Apologies if this has been covered here before. I’m looking to purchase an external SSD that is fast enough to play Apple Lossless files through Apple Music on my M1 Mac mini. Would love to know If anyone is currently doing this and what your experience has been. Thanks!
USB 2.0 external drives with spinning platters are fast enough for that, so I think you don’t need to worry about any SSD being fast enough.
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I have almost 2TB of lossless music on a LaCie 20TB 2Big Thunderbolt 3 connected to my 2018 Mac Mini. There is no advantage of going SSD unless you don’t want to hear the drive spinning. While lossless files are fairly big, they don’t come close to video file sizes. Speed is not an issue here.
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I have 2x Western digital SSD drives in an OWC mini case in RAID 0. This drive has about 1TB of FLAC files and about 600GB of DSD files and is regularly backed up to Google Drive with Arq 7. It’s connected to my iMac 2017 using USB-C. It’s way faster than I needed but I enjoy the silent nature and reliability of this setup over a spinning drive.
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For that, you can easily stream realtime from a NAS. Put you music on a NAS, and off-site backup your NAS. This will decouple your music from any one computer and make it available everywhere. And instantly when you get a new main computer.
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