Apple just announced M2 Mac mini.
priced at $499 edu, $599 normal for the base M2, 8gb ram, 256 gb model. I got the 16 GB upgrade as many suggested since I will be running Roon and Plex.
I can now finally retire the intel nuc as a secondary PC in other room. as the aging fan on that nuc is starting to get loud again.
The new Mac mini is nice. I would also recommend getting a new NUC and reusing your old SSD and RAM. But I will do my best to clean the fan. I think I’m stingy.
the issue isn’t cleaning, I got the i58H series and already went through the warranty process with it once.
The fan used is of very low quality, and bearing in it fails over time. Maybe I can find a fanless enclosure for it and use it for outdoor audio or something down the line.
So that’s it. For the first time, I feel like I understand why the fanless Nucleus exists.
You can get replacement Nuc fans for cheap, doesn’t take long to change out. Or a fanless case, they work as well.
Is the 8 gb base model M2 enough for Roon? I would be interested in making the change of my old Windows7 server.
Way more than enough. Overkill.
if all you use is to run Roon with it, way more than enough.
The only reason I paid for the RAM upgrade is due to wanting to run Plex on it & using it as a living room PC.
Even my M1 MacBook Air is enough for roon with EQ, volume leveling and DSD512 upsampling. If you want to use HQ player DSD256 should be no issue
The M1 seems to have considerably faster SSD read and write speeds.
Perhaps the M1 is still the better option for Roon.
M2 512SSD best option for speed, as the unit is fitted with multiple SSD chips.
The M1 used to have 2 SSDs even for the 256gb SSDs. The M2 have only 1 SSD if you stay below 512gb.
But you could put your local library on a external NVME SSD in a thunderbolt enclosure. The internal SSD shouldn’t make a difference at all for roon
I have my entire library on a NAS. So the reading/writing speed of the internal SSD matters less.
I got the 16 version and looking at the system monitor, I have not swapped anything yet. So many I have dodged a bullet.
Still, wth Apple
But where is your Core? Internal SSD speed matters very much for the Core.
core is on the Mac mini. 
So the core is not one of those load and forget program I see.
Sigh… time to pack up the device and start the return process.
Depends. SSD are fast these days.
The Black Magic Speed test shows write speed of 2339 MB/S and Read speed of 1579 MB/s for 1gig
So the same writing speed but roughly 60% of the reading speed compare to m1 base model.
I wonder if it really makes much of a difference if swap doesn’t happen.
Yeah, pack it up, and go for something faster 
But playing music isn’t that demanding.
I had to look up some shows comparison. Because while it’s half of the speed of m1 it still seems fast.
So it turns out it’s about the same performance to the 960 evo. Not as good as some of the best pcie 3 ssd. But certainly not terrible.
Hmmmm decisions
Did some digging. the Roon Rock optimized core kit has recommended ssd of 905 write and 1715 read for small and medium size library.
Considering Roon consider “Large” size library to be 12k+ album and I am currently on 500s, and the recommend is more based on SSD size than anything.
it’s safe to say the base M2 with 256 mb will be fine for most people until you are approaching the 12k library mark.
Phew!Â