jbenson Posted July 1, 2014 Share Posted July 1, 2014 Hi folks, first post here. I've been lurking for awhile, but I thought I would tap into your wisdom with a specific question before making an important purchase. I've been reading a lot about using a mac mini as a music server, and plan to do so myself. It seems the way to go is to get an external for the music files to keep them on a separate drive. I will be using a Peachtree Nova Pre for my DAC so my USB bus will be tied up with that. I plan to use Amarra as well. Here the question: I have an opportunity to buy a seemingly ideal mac mini on my local craigslist for a great price. 8gb RAM, i7 proc, and a 128SSD internal AND the original 1TB 5400rpm internal both installed. So my question is, if i put the system on the SSD, is the 1tb on the same SATA bus going to choke at all? I would think it should be fine? I am a recording engineer and use 7200 RPM externals for recording multiple (32+) tracks of 24/96.. so i can't imagine iTunes/amarra being an issue using the same SATA bus, even though the music is on a 5400rpm drive.. Any feedback or personal experience is appreciated. Thanks in advance. Link to comment
kumakuma Posted July 1, 2014 Share Posted July 1, 2014 Another option would be an external drive in a Firewire enclosure. I use the ones from OWC (https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/External-Enclosures/). Sometimes it's like someone took a knife, baby Edgy and dull and cut a six inch valley Through the middle of my skull Link to comment
Skeptic Posted July 1, 2014 Share Posted July 1, 2014 I wouldn't worry about it. I doubt both drives are sharing the same bus, and likely have 6Gb/s each. Even so, you get about 550MB/s of bandwidth on a single 6Gb/s connection, and the fastest mechanical hard drives aren't even going to hit half that speed. A 2.5" 5400 RPM 1TB disk is probably only using 100-150MB/s at most. And if all you're doing is playing music, only a fraction of that speed is required. Less than 1MB/s if you're playing lossless files. Link to comment
jbenson Posted July 1, 2014 Author Share Posted July 1, 2014 I wouldn't worry about it. I doubt both drives are sharing the same bus, and likely have 6Gb/s each. Even so, you get about 550MB/s of bandwidth on a single 6Gb/s connection, and the fastest mechanical hard drives aren't even going to hit half that speed. A 2.5" 5400 RPM 1TB disk is probably only using 100-150MB/s at most. And if all you're doing is playing music, only a fraction of that speed is required. Less than 1MB/s if you're playing lossless files. Hi, thanks for this. Exactly the answer i was looking and hoping for.. for some reason i thought i had read that lossless filetypes used much more bandwidth. Looks like this is the way to go. Thanks. Link to comment
baddog Posted July 2, 2014 Share Posted July 2, 2014 I wouldn't worry about it. I doubt both drives are sharing the same bus, and likely have 6Gb/s each. Even so, you get about 550MB/s of bandwidth on a single 6Gb/s connection, and the fastest mechanical hard drives aren't even going to hit half that speed. A 2.5" 5400 RPM 1TB disk is probably only using 100-150MB/s at most. And if all you're doing is playing music, only a fraction of that speed is required. Less than 1MB/s if you're playing lossless files. To echo the points noted above, for quite some time I used a similar Mac Mini configuration with a SSD boot drive and all my music files stored on a separate internal 1 terabyte drive. This worked wonderfully for music playback with Pure Music, Audirvana and JRiver. Barr Silver Circle Audio | Roon | Devialet | Synology | Vivid Audio | Stillpoint Aperture | Auralic | DH Labs Link to comment
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