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Your experience & thoughts on SSDs for MacMini

I have a 2007-2008 MacMini that I use exclusively as a music server on a third system with the stock HD. I am considering replacing the stock HD to an SSD. The stock HD makes noise that is audible often enough to draw unwanted attention to itself.

I'm looking for experience-based thoughts and commentary on the various SSDs that are available for this replacement. I'm using SnowLeopard and iTunes 10 with Pure Music for playback of AIFF files from a peripheral HD (which is silent).

So far, my research on this seems to get a bit confusing. For example, Other World Computing offers two levels of SSD, one over 50% more $ in price (and 25% larger 40 Gb vs 50 Gb than the other (offering a longer warranty, etc.) And I know there are several other manufacturers of SSDs out there with varying price points and related benefits.

This MacMini isn't used for anything else than serving music, ripping files, streaming audio, playing Netflix downloadable movies, and the occasional download from iTunes.

Your points of view are appreciated.

:) listening,

Ed
istanbulu

Showing 6 responses by jylee

jylee
306 posts
 
The only downside of SSD is the price. If you can afford SSD it's a no brainer. SSD is much much faster and completely silent. I use SSD as the main disk drive, and store the music in NAS which is hidden away in a closet.

There are several generations of SSD technology already. Previous generation models tend to be slower and cheaper. For music server you don't need the fastest and latest, so you can shop wisely.
jylee
306 posts
 

Remember when anyone, including the girlfriend or wife, could come home and turn on the receiver and select the tuner and play music in about 5 seconds? That's what needs to become reality with server based audio.

Sure, it can be achieved. My system is modeled after the touch screen display and JRiver as described here.

Touch Screen Music Server

The touch screen makes the operation considerably easier than consumer HT receiver remote control with 100 buttons or a laptop with remote screen sharing. It takes a lot of effort to set it up, but once it's up and running it's a breeze to browse and select music.
jylee
306 posts
 
Computer transport is not for the faint of heart. And I don't believe computer audio will ever become plug-n-play in my lifetime. It works quite well if you know the routines. But the barrier is high enough for a lot of folks, which is unfortunate. It works quite well once set up to your liking.

Ed, I hope you don't get the wrong impression that traditional magnetic disks are more reliable than SSD. Once you have any valuable data on your computer, back up is a must. Think of it as car engine. It requires regular maintenance to get going, and it will ultimately fail without giving a warning. Whether the disk is mechanical or solid state, the data must be backed up at regular schedule because the failure is a matter of when, not a matter of if.
jylee
306 posts
 
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.
jylee
306 posts
 
I don't think the difference in performance between HD and SSD will yield any measurable difference in sound quality. I do think however that there will be more noise generated by spinning magnetic disks compared to SSD with zero moving part. The sensitivity to such noise and any effect will probably be system dependent.
jylee
306 posts
 
SSD may sound better than magnetic HD, but it's largely irrelevant today because there isn't any SSD large enough to store the music collection. I have 600GB+ of music from CD, DVD Audio, and HDTracks. It's not practical to build a disk array to store all the music. Even if I did, the disk array will be connected to the computer externally, further minimizing any effect it could have on the main computer. By the time 2TB SSD is available the SSD technology used will be vastly different from today's SSD anyways, so any comparison done today do not have a lot of practical implication.

The main advantage of using SSD is the SPEED, followed by less power consumption, less heat, and less audible noise. If SSD does sound better than HD, that's like a cherry on top. But that's not the reason why people buy SSD.
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