davidcotton Wrote: > So a system comprising a mac mini>wired SB3>usb external hd of any > make/capacity would work fine?
Yes. I would recommend using firewire instead of USB (about a $10-20 markup on cost per external drive) for two reasons: 1. Firewire daisy-chains in a more straightforward manner. 2. USB hits harder on the cpu. With only one external drive, and with it dedicated solely to music, it may be a push between usb and firewire. However, I predict that at some point in the future you will be tempted to expand the external connection both in size and function. :) I was looking into this a few months ago (dear, has it really been only about three months??), and my last post in this thread is close to where I ended up: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18555 The main difference is that I went with these cases instead, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817145657 because of their whisper-quiet and efficient fan-cooling systems. At the moment I've daisy-chained five of these and the performance has been excellent. Firewire is quirky so we'll see if it holds up on the scale of years, but if I decide that it's too flaky, I can always take out the drives and I'm only out the expense of the cases (for which there will often be some use). And yes, I went with a mini instead of linux and it ended up being a 1.5ghz g4 with 1 gig of RAM. It's not just the music server, it is also my desktop machine and I have to work pretty hard to make it do dropouts on the slimserver (dvd2onex is usually one of the ingredients). As long as the app is not keen on hijacking the cpu instructions, slimserver just keeps on running. One thing that happens is that the refresh page on "Browse Albums" takes a while (sometimes a minute or two). However that may have something to do with the size of my collection. :) The bandwidth off the firewire arrays is currently at about 100-120 MbPS (i.e. 12-13 MBPS), which is huge compared to what is needed for music (about 60x-100x for flac files). What that means in practice is that even if you are reading off one of the drives as you play songs, you can use that drive in all the usual ways such as intensive reading and writing from it and not have a problem. -- trebejo ------------------------------------------------------------------------ trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=21777 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
