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RE: Good to know... And the fan doesn't seem to ever come on...

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

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