Ben, that is a good idea, store the musicfiles in high speed SD. Then the mac can be stand-alone even without ethernet.
In my case I went for a [new 😕] 1,4 GHz MacMini. I go headless, and will use Audinirvana. This allows getting tracks from NAS and store these in temporary memory (just 4 Gb but Audinirvana says 4 is enough).
MoJo says
but I do not have requirements for upsampling, I go NOS to start off.
I have two DACs made by myself, one XMOS/IanCanada/PCM1704; the other is XMOS/TDA1541. They will only stream what comes in. Nothing very processor-intensive. - I expect the Mac to do what the Raspberry at 1.4 Ghz does hands down.
By the way, I have read that in the Mac Mini some have used the SD cardslot to store OS and the audioprogram (mentioned were MacOs + Amanera). A bit of a hassle to install and start up maybe but otherwise it can confortably sleep.
Even 256GB SD cards are cheap esp when Staples has their pop-up sales.
While (at least for Macs) the SD slot operates on the same buss as the USB (as I poorly understand it), I'm not sure USB thumb drives (such as those holding your SD card or with internal flash memory) run as fast as a plain SD card in the SD slot.
For sure, I never recall having a hiccough playing Apple Lossless or high-quality MP4a from an SD card (using SD cards with 45-90 read speeds).
Ben
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