best mac mini option for external music drive?

Check out the blog on the Supratek website .Mick Maloney has some interesting thoughts on PC audio,which you may find interesting.

A modern Mac mini has multiple connections that can be used for an external hard drive, including USB 3, FireWire 800, and Thunderbolt. They are all excellent options, although Thunderbolt has the highest theoretical throughput, although all will exceed the maximum sustained throughput from an external hard drive. You can even use the ethernet port if connecting to an NAS, and that should work adequately for audio applications. So your answer for the best choice for the Mac to hard drive connection is likely any of the above options.

As for your observation that networking affects audio performance on the PC (interesting), not all network interface cards are created equal. The better ones offload much of the processing from the computer's main processor and does more of the work on the card itself. This may affect processor availability for audio applications. I also find it better to use dedicated (external) router/firewall appliances rather than running such software on a general-purpose computer.

Michael

If your SATA drive is NTFS formatted, the Mac Mini can read from it but can't write to it by default unless you have a 3rd party NTFS driver installed. Please bewared.

Sidssp, thinks for the tip on NTFS. Drives are cheap enough that it would be easy to copy to one formatted best for Mac now that I can anticipate.

With the PC I have tried direct Ethernet attached NAS, which did not have the same transparency and detail as local SATA connected drive after network was disabled.