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In Reply to: Re: Z-E-R-O difference sonically. posted by xmasparty@mac.com on November 2, 2005 at 13:40:49:
Since the MAC Mini is appealing for many reasons, is the risk of USB/Firewire drives one of robustness (i.e. drive failure??) If so, I would be willing to consider a SATA drive as a backup device, and leave the MAC MINI and external drives as the "daily driver."I do listen very little, about 10 hours per week at best, and usually concentrated in 3 listening sessions, the drives would otherwise be turned off.
Thanks for the time you took in your thoughtful response.
Follow Ups:
I would definitely not rule out the Mini because of SATA. I should have said - given a choice... for instance if you build out a Win box its pretty trivial to add a SATA card in a PCI slot - and these are available for internal (so you can add the drive inside the tower) or external use. The new Mac boxes like my G5 all have SATA innards.It is not so much a matter of drive failure (its all the same manufacturers) as it is how easily it mounts (shows up on the desktop), how finicky the cabling is etc. After all before SATA there was only Firewire (leaving SCSI out of the discussion because its not relevant.) There are millions and millions out there so don't over think it. Take a look at www.macgurus.com for more SATA info. And www.granitedigital.com for firewire enclosures, premium cables etc
The Mini has Firewire 400 and USB 2.0 So you know, USB 2.0 is a much faster format - actually a bit faster then Firewire 800. However in this application - meaning audio - it is simply not an issue - both will do the job. If you also want to do photos and or video then go the USB 2 route. Either way you can daisy chain multiple drives. So make your best deal on a quiet enclosure and move on. And yes a fan is one key to longevity - though the fanless cases are tempting...
Realistically ripping a large library takes time. Enough time that investing a few hundred dollars to back it up on another hard drive makes sense.
Hope this helps
xmasparty, USB2 has higher burst transfer rate. However, Firewire has higher sustainable transfer rate. You are right, for WAV it does not make any difference. For video, Firewire is a weapon of choice.
Bobp is correct, Firewire is the choice for very large files such as those typically found in digital video and photography. If this was a choice between USb2 and FW800, FW would be the clear winner - and is the de facto standard at most digital studios.But in the specific case of the Mac Mini, IMHO the much higher data rates make USB2 is a better choice for large files when compared to Firewire 400 which is what the Mini offers. (I am going to make a wild leap here and guess that anyone putting some photos on a Mini is not exactly pushing 100Mb multi-layer files down the pipe...)
Plus, from a pecuniary point of view, FW400 can safely be considered a dying standard while USB2 is the king of the hill - meaning a lot more choices and a lot more aggressive discounting.
For the purpose of serving music across an Ethernet connection the usb1 spec is more than sufficient. Given this, the added bandwidth of fire wire, usb2, sata is purely academic.And like I originally said, the OS platform and its supporting hardware has zero bearing on sound quality if one is running a Slimserver/SB.
it is true - but that is not what the Mini comes with...as for SATA - I will never go back to Firewire for anything but back-up - this has nothing to do with speed (which is nice but not necessary here) and everything to do with the fact that my devices behave like they are supposed to - FILO, FOLI, hard start, hard crash, makes no never mind
noise (if it's located in the same room), and size does....Remember, - it's not the hard drive that "plays" the music or even delivers it, - but the whole computer.
Our "Server" is in the basement. It has more to do with the amount of RAM memory + processor speed.
One can connect an Ethernet cable to the file server, - or use their airport as we do, - and have 1 gig of RAM powerbook G4 and a simple little 6 gig HD on an IBook or MAC Mini.
The hard drive is just a storage bin
"Not necessarily beautiful, but mutated"
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