Had some serious issues with my Mac Mini, which resulted in a hard drive failure and having to pay a fair bit to recover 660gb of music stored as Lossless files. The repair shop is still unsure if there are further issues with the Mac. I was wondering if I should replace with another Mac Mini (that’ll be my third over the last 12 years) or head off into another direction. I understand that I can’t run Roon from an external SSD, so I’d have spend quite a bit on a new Mac with 1tb of internal SSD. I’m trying to balance being a Mac fanboy my entire adult life, and trying not to get too technical, with getting the best sound quality from Roon. Any help would be much appreciated.
What about getting a used one? I am running my core on a 2009 mini.
There won’t be any SQ difference based on what you run your Roon core upon; however, there maybe functional differences between the choices.
Why Internal Storage? You could go with one of the new mac mini’s and use an external storage device, much cheaper than internal storage.
I run ROON on a couple late 2012 Mac mini with no issue. 500gb SSD internal. 1rb SSD Thunderbolt external. Sweet Cheep and efficient.
That’s all very interesting, thanks. I was under the impression (wrongly it seems) that I can’t run Roon using and external SSD. I Guess it just needs to point to the right drive?
I have access via a friend to additional 2011 Mac Mini, which I guess could work, despite being a bit long in the tooth. I’m interested in a new (refurb store) one when the time is right.
I would also consider backing up externally using a service like BlackBlaze which offers unlimited backup for $5 a month. I backup my entire music library (.flac) and can simply download them if a drive fails.
Good point - would have saved me a lot of grief and money!
I’ll add another recommendation for Backblaze. I have two backups of my main 8TB music drive, one at home and one offsite, but I also use Backblaze for further peace of mind. It takes a long time to upload everything, but once your backup is created any incremental additions get added fairly quickly.
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