Discovered this site a few months ago; I'm in love. And, I'm in awe of such a constructive community - so hard to find on the web these days.
Here's my newbie question:
My old HP MediaVault 2010 NAS is dying and I'm looking to create a relatively powerful yet reasonably priced music server. After extensive research, I've decided upon the Mac Mini.
I don't have an extremely large music collection and the 320 GB (or even 500 GB) internal HDD on the Mac Mini would be plenty of storage for me for the foreseeable future.
The thing is, almost every music server setup I read about with a Mac Mini includes an external HDD (or NAS device) connected either via Firewire 800 or USB. Generally these are 1 to 2 TB in size, so my assumption is that the necessity for an external HDD for file storage is due to the sheer size needed for storage of a large quantity of high quality audio files.
Is there any particular reason why I wouldn't want to store my files on my internal HDD in the Mac Mini and play music through iTunes on that music server? I would of course have an external HDD for backup purposes, but not for storage of my music library. Are there disadvantages to this setup other than I will eventually outgrow the storage capacity of the Mini and need to move to storage on an external HDD or NAS?
Thank you all in advance!
-Erik
