MacMini vs NAS to play music and video

[Giuanniello]

Hello everybody,

I have a NAS running twin 2TB drives in RAID1 configuration, I have a movies folder through which I stream them to a couple AppleTV4 but it's quite complicated, I thought I might get a Mini instead of upgrading the hard drives in the NAS (which is almost full and a couple 3TB would rip me off a couple hundred euros) and have it tied directly to the TV via HDMI and to the preamp to play FLAC music which I now have to play thorough my MacBookAir.

I could buy an used Mini, change the spinning drive with a 500GB SSD and have it so serve for both music and movies and leave the NAS to only serve as a download station and to be a hub for the various computers to access files, I might even get rid of it since its main use now is to stream movies...

Your thoughts appreciated


Giovanni

 

[Boyd01]

I have the base model 1.4ghz 2014 Mini with 4gb RAM and 500gb hard drive for an iTunes server. It just sits there and runs iTunes with home sharing 24/7. I also use it as a network drive via Apple's built-in file sharing and get about 100mb/sec over gigabit ethernet. This works really well for my needs. For me, it would just be a waste of money to drop an SSD into my Mini. The only time that the slow hard drive matters is when the machine starts up - which is maybe 5 or 6 times per year.

All my media is on an external 4tb USB 3.0 hard drive that clocks around 180mb/sec. Again, I don't see any point in using an expensive ssd for that when I can already pretty much saturate gigabit ethernet. I have two additional external drives and periodically rotate them. Carbon Copy runs late every night to clone the media drive. Again, I don't see much value to RAID for my use. After about 3 years, my primary media drive died. Took less than 5 minutes to get back up and running from the clone that was made the night before. Now if I was heavily using this machine as a network drive, that would be another matter. But the only thing I'm likely to lose when switching to a clone is the play count on a couple movies or songs.

This mini is also connected to a 24" screen so I can watch movies directly with iTunes in that room. It's plugged into my home stereo system with speakers in different rooms via the headphone jack (good enough for me). Don't know if this fits your needs, but I have been very happy with it.

 

[Gjwilly]

Hello everybody,

I have a NAS running twin 2TB drives in RAID1 configuration, I have a movies folder through which I stream them to a couple AppleTV4 but it's quite complicated,

How are you streaming from the NAS directly to the ATV4?
That's what I'd like to do.
I used to have a NAS with all my media but I also had a Mini because I thought I needed a Mac running iTunes 24/7 to host the media. So I ended up mounting the NAS as a shared drive on the Mini and using that as my iTunes media folder.
I was in the same boat as you, running out of space on my NAS so I finally ditched the NAS and used external USB-3 drives connected directly to the Mini.
I was told that performance should have increased slightly because instead of the media having to stream twice (from NAS to Mini and then from Mini to ATV) it would only stream once but if anything, performance is a little worse without the NAS. Media takes ever so slightly longer to load and sometimes when finishing one show and moving onto another, the ATV4 suddenly "forgets" whats in my media folder and I need to back all the way out to my shared library and then go back through all the levels to find my next show.
My Mini is the late 2012 and it does have a 500GB SSD.

 

[Boyd01]

but if anything, performance is a little worse without the NAS.

That's interesting. As I wrote, I clock my directly connected USB 3.0 media drive at 180MB/sec. If your NAS is connected via gigabit ethernet, the theoretical limit would be about 120MB/sec. You could try running the Blackmagic disk test on your direct and NAS drives to get some idea of what's going on.

What model Mini are you using? The mini didn't get USB 3.0 until 2012 and that would make a big difference since USB 2.0 is only around 30MB/sec.

 

[Giuanniello]

How are you streaming from the NAS directly to the ATV4?

I stream to the ATV4 through Infuse, it works smoothly and can play them all, .wmv .mkv .avi etc