i’m contemplating replacing my current music server with a mac mini m4. as the subject line says, the library consists of approximately 200K tracks distributed over 12K albums, altogether about 6tb.
my question is whether the following architecture will perform adequately (i’m including as much detail as i can extract from the listings in amazon):
Apple 2024 Mac mini Desktop Computer with M4 chip with 10‑core CPU and 10‑core GPU: Built for Apple Intelligence, 24GB Unified Memory, 512GB SSD Storage
ACASIS 40Gbps Mac mini M4 Dock & Stand with Dual-Bay NVMe SSD Enclosure, Aluminum DP Hub for Mac mini M4 and M4 Pro 2024, 4K60Hz DP, 3X10G USB A, PD 30W, SD/TF 4.0, Support Dual SSD B+M M-Key
Samsung SSD 9100 PRO with Heatsink 8TB, PCIe 5.0x4 M.2 2280, Seq. Read Speeds Up to 14,800/13,400 MB/s
i have and use apple hardware everywhere in my house, especially to host the roon client.
although i’ve been happy with my existing music server (salk streamplayer III se), recent changes on the mac side have caused endless problems, apparently not completely solvable.
there certainly should be sufficient horsepower in the architecture described above, and seamless integration with my existing apple hardware is a definite plus.‘’
i’ve read mixed opinions elsewhere on this site regarding roon on an m4 server, but would like to get fresh takes.
I’m guessing the spec of that machine makes it M4 Pro and I think the extra memory should make all the difference over the 16GB of the basic Mac Mini when it comes to Roon running a 200K library of track’s
I have bought the same pro model a couple of weeks ago and have been putting it though it’s paces as a HQPlayer server for the last week. My library is 90K track’s so is half the size of yours, and I am thinking of adding Roon to it this weekend as well and copy my library across and test it out
P.S. I tend to think it will work with available headroom for you (24GB and the extra cores should help. I would also engage performance mode on the pro for initial testing as well)
If you’re hell bent on going the Mac route, you’ll be just fine.
I think you’re overshooting the storage performance though.
You dont need Solid State storage for your media, you could do just fine with a spinning 3.5" drive, its performance is well beyond what your media library needs.
That said, i have a few Cores, one of them is a basic MacMini M4acting as Core with the media on a NAS. It is performing nice, just a smidge slower than my ordinary Intel Core i5 11400, Win11 IoTEnt LTSC, 32Gb DDR4, 250Gb NVMe and 12Tb Toshiba HDD.
My library is similar to yours, some 14k albums and 10Tb of music.
A few hundred albums from Qobuz included.
I agree with the music storage requirements. My music is stored on a 3 tb USB powered hard drive. Not an SSD. It happily plays several FLAC files at the same times if I ask it to do. You don’t need SSD speeds to playback music.
thanks mikael. i dislike spinning disks. i’ve had too many fail on me over the years, so i’m willing to spend the extra $ for longevity and reliability.
as i mentioned mikael, i favor ssd for its longevity and reliabilty. spinning disks fail, and who wants to spend days copying a backup drive before one can listen to music. at least, that’s my experience. (although my current server hosts 8tb of onboard memory, and five years in has experienced no problems.)
Ouch, Glad I bought my 4TB Samsung 990 Pro 2 weeks ago then
I am syncing the music from my NAS now using FreeFileSync after it kept failing when I did it from my PC software. I have never used this tool before, but I think a donation will be on it’s way to the developer in the next couple of weeks.
We can never have too many copies of our music files (or so I believe).
Personally I like to have music on SSD when active and on spinning drives for backups and I then keep these backups in various peoples houses and update them at different times.
This is what I do too. Local library files are stored on a 2TB SSD on my Roon Server machine which is then synchronised with a share on my NAS which employs (5) mechanical hard disks which is then, in turn backed up separately to both another mechanical disk array and an off-site location.
I use local storage on my Roon Server in order to minimise the amount of traffic on the network - at least when listening to local library content. I use an SSD on the Roon Server for its complete lack of mechanical noise since my Roon Server is in my main listening room.
I don’t use an SSD for library storage on my Roon Server because of any perceived reliability benefit. Indeed, since I bought my first computer in the very early 1990’s, I have experienced more SSD failures (1) than HDD failures (0) and I have had many HDDs and a good few SSDs.
SSD and RAM prices are going through the roof. AI companies are paying top Dollar/Euro for them. So consumer prices skyrocket as well cause producers are smelling money.
I got a quote for a new PC ,nothing flash, the first quote around August the second in December. The. Component prices has moved a bit , the RAM for exact same spec was over 2x . This is the answer I got
Very true, it will be interesting to see what happens to high speed NVME prices as well. I pulled the trigger on my Mac Mini M4 Pro a bit earlier than planned, I was going to wait for the M5 mini release, but with the discounts on offer now along with 24GB RAM and the NVME prices I decided to go for it and see how it went.
@Stevan_Apter my library of just under 6K albums has been up and running for about 12 hours and backup restored. As expected it got pretty warm during analysis (enough that I dropped it down to 4 cores for that job from the initial 8 cores that I set) and took about 6 hours to complete. The 10th Gen fanless NUC got so warm that I was concerned about total failure but it was fine and took much longer to complete the task.
Roon (across the 3 processes) is currently taking up close to 5GB RAM (including 1GB for the Roon client which can be shut down and run from another device) so that is a quite a bit less than the same library running on DietPi (maybe Apple is making more use of memory compression than the last time I tried it several years ago.
With the Mac running in permanent performance mode with 8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores it seems to be handling things very nicely. With the analysis complete, and with 3 zones playing music, all with volume leveling and 1 zone upscaling there is no impact on the machine and it is almost completely running on efficiency cores and is running at about 4-6% processor utilisation.
It feels to me like it would handle your library with relative ease but maybe allow 12 hours for library analysis and only give it 3-4 cores for that task.
