Well I bought one (Mac Mini 2011)
Have no drive or have no drive?
You can add an external HDD or share a drive with another mac with a CD drive.
When did Apple ever say the mac mini was designed to be a media centre, even though the 2010 model was very suited to the job.
The mac mini was away for the consumer to buy a cheap affordable mac and add your own monitors / keyboard and mouse that you may of used with a PC so you had more control of costs
Next time, connect both machines with firewire. Reboot the old machine holding down T, enables target firewire mode (works with thunderbolt too). This effectively turns the enabled machine in to an external firewire disk.
Thanks! 
I was struggling to transfer contents from my old MacBook to my new one which arrived today. 
I think they should put that command on the box, it's one of the macs best features and they don't write it anywhere! It works without a functioning OS so is super handy for recovery.
I have been using an older mac mini with the optical drive for a while now and have borrowed a brand spanking new mini from me brother for a comparison and I cannot see, hear or notice any difference at all- especially when running Bit perfect.
the only issue I have with the old one is the noise of the disk drive when ripping
If your test was by feeding the digital output to your 6XPD, then you shouldn't really hear any difference between them, assuming you normaly listen to your own Mac Mini through it.
(You probably know that).
Ok i still use an external DVD drive with my mac mini, though its not often. Once i had ripped all my music to iTunes i may make a CD for the car or stereo every couple of months but apart from that i use usb drives to transfer most files now.
I would also admit i wanted the mac mini with the DVD drive built in and i can see pro's and con's for both models with or without the superdrive
But saying that i beleive the 2011 mac mini is a bigger seller than the 2010 model though i cannot find the figures even without the DVD drive
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