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In Reply to: RE: I plan to run LMS on my headless Mac Mini... posted by Rod M on May 07, 2017 at 07:30:18
even when playing music. Plus I understand the new fans are quieter than before.
Now if I could just figure out a way to turn of the light on the front my wife would never know its on.
Next question: What's the best, most reliable 3TB Thunderbold drive I can use for file storage. Not a network drive but, for good or ill, my system uses a hard drive directly attached to the Mac Mini. Using a LeCie drive now and it's gone bad once and is noisy when on.
Follow Ups:
I don't see the advantage of a Thunderbolt drive for a music server. Most people using them are in video production where performance and transfer rates are important. However, my wife is doing video with Adobe Premier and I built her a 6 core i7 system with an SSD and fast 7,200 rpm 4TB drives. She had issues with work flow and backup and started just uploading her raw files to our QNAP NAS drive hard wired on a gigbit connection. She found that using the NAS was just as fast as doing everything on the local drives. Of course, the SSD handles the local cache and whatnot.
For your purposes, buy a pair of 4 TB USB drives. You can get them for about $130 or less. Connect one to the Mac and use the second one from another computer to backup over your network from one to the other. I did this for a long time and then. moved the library to a fast internal drive on a new system. I noticed no difference whatsoever. Streaming music just doesn't require much speed. To be safe, it'd be better to have 3 USB drives and use 2 for backups. I find that USB drives tend to fail every 3 to 5 years.
FYI:
Thunderbolt 2 vs USB 3.0 vs eSATA: Speed. All three standards are much, much faster than USB 2.0, which tops out at 480Mbps. eSATA can deliver 6Gbps (older versions deliver 1.5Gbps or 3Gbps), USB 3.0 runs at up to 5Gbps and the incoming USB 3.1 should do 10Gbps. Thunderbolt can do 20Gbps.
Since in theory, the drives themselves don't go faster than 6Gbps, in practice, Thunderbolt can never exceed that speed. A typical wav file is about 10MB per minute and would equate to about 0.1 gigibits, so you can transfer the whole file into memory in seconds while it plays for minutes.
As Cut Throat mentioned, a NAS drive with RAID is a better option and less expensive than Thunderbolt which I'm not sure that even Apple is going to continue pushing. You would still need a USB backup though. I've never run LMS from a NAS, but it should be the same with the exception that library updates might be a bit slower and you'd need to set it up as a saved Network location, so that you don't lose it on a reboot.
-Rod
that the person who set this Mac Mini up for audio only preferred to only use one USB output port and that USB be dedicated to the DAC.
That meant using the Thuderbolt port for storage.
Silly?
Maybe.
Audiophile?
You bet!
Yeah, having only two USB ports is an issue and you already have the Thunderbolt drive.
If that thing dies again, you might consider a real NAS. Our QNAP has been great and if a drive dies, it emails me and you just swap in a new one and it rebuilds the RAID array. They also support Thunderbolt along with being a standard Ethernet attached NAS. OTOH, I only saw 8 bay units with Thunderbolt which is pricey and a bit overkill unless you need 20 to 35TB of storage.
-Rod
I've been telling people for years that you do not have to run your USB DAC and storage off different style interfaces. They can both be on USB but just look at the USB device tree to ensure that your disk and potentially other devices are not on the same USB controller as the DAC. It's so simple to do but I suppose for some, it might be easier and more comforting to use totally different interfaces.... USB & Thunderbolt as an example.
Now if I could just figure out a way to turn of the light on the front my wife would never know its on.
It's called "painter's tape". I use it to cover an obnoxiously bright LED on the bedroom cable box. :)
to hide all of the stuff that's on all the time and keep my wife from running around the house in the middle of the night looking for stuff to unplug. =:-0
Black and grey electrical tape with do the job too.
-Rod
I had a 12v power supply on my desk running my 2m FM HAM Radio. The radio is usually squelched while I work but the power supply had two nasty bright LEDs on the front panel distracting my vision. A strip of black electrical tape completely blocked the light from the LEDs. And the tape is easily removed w/o leaving much gunk behind. And any small bit of residue just rubs off.
Edits: 05/07/17
Why not a network drive? Installing a NAS was the best thing (Computer wise) that I have done in the last 10 years.... Makes sharing files very simple, as well as backups, remote access and Music playback. The device sits in my Basement plugged into a router. No more noisy disks where I am 'living'.
Cut-Throat
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