Quote:
Originally Posted by 1KW
This may end up being my best option , I’ll have to configure one and see the price. You don’t hear about too many people making Mac mini into dedicated music servers these days. I thought about upgrading to 8 gig of ram as mine is only 6 gig. and putting a ssd hd in to replace the mechanical one but then I think putting money into a 8 year old machine doesn’t make sense.
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I looked into this a few weeks back when the logic board of my 7-year old Mac Mini died.
The most value-added thing to do is to buy an Intel NUC Gen 7 Quad-core i5 2.3 GHz with 64 or 128 Gb M.2 SSD and 8 GB of RAM. You can do this for <$500. Put the Roon Core on the NUC using ROCK (Roon OS Core Kit) and all your music file metadata will easily fit on on 64GB as well; the only issue here is its hard to find 64 GB M.2 SSDs any more, so you might have to buy a 128 GB M.2 SSD, which is way more than you need. The Roon Core would now be reside on an SSD for fast data I/O. Connect an external HD with your music files, or if you buy a full-height (tall) NUC, you can install up to 4 TB 2.5" HD and have a nice all-in-one-box solution for about $300-$350 less than an entry-level Mac Mini. You don't need a 6-core, high-bandwidth i7 processor or 16GB RAM to run Roon Core; this is supported by Roon's own documentation.
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Last edited by Puma Cat; 05-14-2019 at 03:24 PM.
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