Your experience & thoughts on SSDs for MacMini

Tbg,

Perrew, having had two prior Windows servers, my expectations are the opposite of yours.

Having MacMini 2010 here, my experience is the opposite of yours. I have installed Win7 (x64) on the MacMini and run it with Jriver and ASIO4ALL. Since I can run both Mac OS X and Win7 on the same MacMini, to my ears, Jriver/ASIO setup outperforms iTunes/PM playback in every respect. I also find Jriver much more user-friendly compared to iTunes.

But even with Jriver/ASIO, the MacMini is still inferior (both sound and internal hardware) to a "cheap" $700 Core i3/HM55 Toshiba laptop. And I love my external 2TB (Barracuda XT) RAID enclosure connected to the eSATA port of the Toshiba! If Firewire was that great, why the internal drives of the Mac use the SATA controller? Very strange!

Mac is extremely nice; great OS/exterior/convenience design, and there were number of reasons why it sounded better than Win based players, but that is now history, IMO!

What is MacMini? It is an outdated Core 2 Duo Intel-based laptop. It is packed to the micron so there is no space for proper filtration (suitable for high quality audio) of the “million” switching charge-pump regulators inside. On the top, Apple decided to make things even more convenient for the user with a built-in 12V LiteON main switching power supply. Apple did a very fine job again (very sleek), but that was not intended and obviously does not serve very well when it comes to high-end audio. IMO, again!

Look at this picture here. It shows Mini-ITX motherboard for Intel Core i3/5/7. Look at the little round things called filter capacitors and count how many they are. And look at this here showing MacMini 2010 motherboard. As you can see, there are NO large filter capacitors. Al they use is the absolutely minimum required value of Tantalum capacitors (ask around how they sound for audio apps). Why? No space.

Best,
Alex Peychev

I agree with Alex. I use a Mac at work, at home, and I prefer to use Mac to PC whenever possible. For music application it's a different story. After trying my Macbook Pro and Mac Mini, it became evident that iTunes and the Core Audio stack is optimized for convenience, not fidelity. I had to reconvert all my music from ALAC to FLAC when I finally switched to JRiver, but it was well worth the effort.

Perrew,

You killing me man. Please read what I wrote and quit "extrapolating". Take my words as they are written. There is no hidden meanings... I never mentioned any preference for either power supply. I never said we didn't A/B test internal drives.

We have A/B tested internal SSD vs. regular HD. We build Mach2 servers every day. It is easy for use to listen to a Mac, swap the drive and listen to it again. We also have plenty of Mach2 servers around to compare to stock.

Internal drives are typically small compared to folks 1-2 terabyte libraries. If have a small library you can store it internally.

Happy Listening,
www.mach2music.com

Dmccombs, thats not my intention:-)

Without extrapolating then, why do you not have linear PS or battery on the server?

So how did the internal HDD compare to an internal SSD?

SSDs are getting quite large so with two of those you can cover quite large librarys.

Im just trying to learn here how to best optimize my server.

Perrew,

An internal SSD is way better than a regular hard drive, sonically. The only thing to decide is how big you need (or can afford).

I hope my comments regarding the value of SSD vs a regular hard drive have been helpful. I'm sure others will chime in.

I'll skip the power supply questions so we don't derail the thread.

Darrell
www.mach2music.com