2011 Mac Mini - Is SSD worth it?

04-06-12: Nonoise
I tried to find a link to a thread, here, on Audiogon, where someone who's expertise is in SSDs and the like went on to state that SSDs are not any more reliable or quieter since a HD can be insulated to where noise is not a factor.

As far as acoustical noise is concerned, as opposed to electrical noise which was what was addressed in the earlier posts by me and some of the others, I don't think that any meaningful generalizations can be drawn. An HDD model that is inherently quieter than average, and that has low rotational speed, and is mounted via rubber washers or other vibration absorbent means on a rigid non-resonant case structure that has minimal openings to the outside, will be pretty much totally silent. A high speed high performance HDD that is not so mounted will be noisy. An SDD will provide much higher speed than any desktop or laptop HDD while generating no acoustical noise.

Concerning reliability, the jury is probably still out on SDD's, but IMO if an HDD or an SDD contains important material it should be assumed that it can fail at any time. My practice is to back up data files daily, and to create an image of the entire operating system drive every few weeks. That avoids the necessity of having to install and set up all of the software from scratch if the drive has to be replaced.

Best regards,
-- Al

Al,

You're the voice of reason with the patience of Job. It must be trying dealing with us mere mortals:-)

All kidding aside, I'm finally getting the gist of what you're saying about all the internal noise that goes on inside anything electric. One would think that it would be one of the issues manufacturers consider and deal with but alas, building to a price point would preclude that, to a degree.

All the best,
Nonoise

My understanding is when using an app like Amarra, Pure Music, and Audirvana your music will be loaded into memory first, thus making the point of ssd moot (at least in regards to music playback).

This thread is a good reference,
http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?icomp&1325426864

SSD does not have mechanical parts that might fail but has one tiny reliability problem - limited number of write cycles. For that reason controller shuffles location of files to minimize number of writes to particular location. There are mostly read cycles in music server application and that is just perfect for SSD. Remember to never defragment SSD because it doesn't improve anything but uses a lot of writes.

Music is always loaded into memory since HD has no timing but perhaps certain programs put whole song into memory before playing. I don't know why this would be better but you might defeat timing problems altogether by using transfer that doesn't contain timing like wireless or Ethernet. My Airport Express is bit perfect and eliminates any need for programs other than Itunes, processor speed, memory size, HD type or interface, special power supplies, computer optimization etc. Just old Mac mini plugged into different outlet across the room. You can also use computer for other tasks and it won't change a thing. The only drawback of such setup is the fact that timing has to be recreated on the other side. Since some wireless receivers like AE produce some jitter (but not a lot) it would be even better to use reclocker or jitter suppressing DAC (that contains reclocker) like my Benchmark DAC1.