I’m a proud new owner of a DirectStream DAC and loving every minute of it. I have a 2011 Mac Mini music server that currently uses just a regular standard (non SSD) hard drive. I have been considering purchasing an external hard drive to both back up and potentially run my music from. I have the option of using the Thunderbolt connection with the mini…is it worth it to upgrade to a hard drive with that option in terms of sound quality? Otherwise, I’ll just continue to use the internal hard drives until I have a chance to upgrade to the SSD internal drive. Thanks for any help!!
FWIW (since I’m on Windows) I have my library on external bus powered USB drives - the amount of reads you need to do for audio playing is pretty small so you don’t pollute the audio too much with those (especially if you use a big pre-read buffer or buffer whole files.) An SSD internal drive is much quieter electrically so all of the other stuff running on your computer will have less of an effect on the audio. I’ve had SSD drives in my last two laptops and in spite of their smaller capacity I’d never go back to hard drives.