I currently run the Roon Server on an HP Desktop, running Windows 11 (Intel(R) Core™ i5. I use this PC with a Primare I35 integrated amp. The PC is used primarily as a Roon server for light email and the internet. I have four external drives attached via USB and an Album/Track count of 14494/339407 so I don’t think the Nucleus One would work for me and the Titan is outside my budget.
My question is whether there would be any advantages to switching my server to the base Mac Mini M4 (16GB Unified Memory, 256GB SSD Storage) and whether this is a transition that requires technical savvy.
I have never used Macs so I don’t know the relative merits of your Windows desktop with an i5 processor compared to an M4 Mac Mini.
In fact you have not given details of the exact i5 or the amount of memory so it would be hard to tell anyway.
However, assuming the Desktop is not too old, and it has sufficient Ram, it should be a pretty competent Roon Server. It does not sound like your other activities on the computer would greatly interfere with Roon Server operation so my guess is that you will not see a great performance difference.
One motivation for moving to a Mac Mini (or a NUC based solution) would be that the power consumption would be reduced. This may be a consideration for a device that is running most, if not all, of the time.
I got 10% of your library size but as example… yesterday I ripped a Dolby atmos Blu-ray, was surfing the internet and playing a 7.1 48khz file upsampled to DSD512 , downmixed to stereo with PEQ and crossfeed to my headphone setup and the Base M4 Mac mini did basically idle at 8-10% cpu usage and was probably not even using performance cores for most of it.
So that’s like 20 watt or less that you are using in such a scenario.
Not sure if this helps but the m4 is a great roon machine .
No sound quality advantage but if you want to make the jump to MacOS, the Mac Mini M4 is a great choice. I have a Mac Mini M4 for my Roon server that sits in a desk in my basement. I have a MacBook Pro that I can use upstairs to login to the Mac Mini and do updates. Otherwise the Mac Mini just sits on all the time and runs
