[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
What's the point of having external box unless you stream music from a laptop? funkstar Wrote: another option would be a Thecus N2050 (http://www.thecus.com/products_over.php?cid=1pid=3) this will take two drives and can be attached with either eSATA or USB2. Or the N2100 which is a two drive Network Attached Storage box which can also have additional USB devices attahed to it. They look nice, for who has a laptop with eSATA support? Otherwise why to pay $300+ just for enclosure, and not to simply squeeze another SATAII drive into your computer? When you're into hudreads of $ for enclosure, Infrant's ReadyNAS looks much more cost effective. And comparing to Thecus 2100 NAS has significantly better performance. -- 325xi 325xi's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5661 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
different strokes for different folks. The N2050 also has USB2 so eSATA on a laptop/desktop is required. -- funkstar funkstar's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2335 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
snarlydwarf Wrote: The catch is that there is no clock in that data. There isn't a seperate line saying okay, here comes the next bit! which would get rid of the jitter argument completely. And because even the crystals that control timing are not -exactly- accurate, you can see errors where it tries to derive a clock. If the sender is sending bits at 44,100 bits per second, and the receiver's clock is just a slight bit off at 44,098 bits per second, it is going to misread some.This isn't quite correct. The receiver does not generate its own clock from an oscillator. It extracts the clock from the SPDIF signal coming from the transport. What you have described is data errors. Jitter is not data errors. Jitter is variations in the timing between adjacent clock pulses. Sometimes jitter can be so bad that it causes data errors, but that's very unusual and is not what most people are concerned about in digital-to-analog converters. The problem that jitter creates in a DAC is additional noise at the analog output. A digital sample is meant to represent Voltage = V(n) at time = T(n) where n is the number of the sample within the sequence. Generally the samples are equally spaced in time, so that T(101) - T(100) is the same as T(1001) - T(1000). The samples are sent to the DAC in sequence at a constant rate, along with a clock signal with one upward pulse per sample. Like snarlydwarf described for the hard drive, the data for V(100) is sent slightly before the 100th clock pulse to make sure it reaches the DAC before the clock pulse. When the clock pulse arrives, BAM. The DAC reads the data on its input pins and immediately changes its output level to the voltage that matches V(100). It holds that value while the 101st data sample arrives, then switches the output to V(101) when the next (101st) clock pulse arrives. Then the output is filtered to connect the dots of the stair-step output voltage and make a smooth curve that matches the original wave that was captured by the analog-to-digital converter in the studio. That's great, and if the clock pulses really are equally spaced then you should perfectly reproduce the original wave (assuming the analog to digital converter also works perfectly). But what happens if there is jitter in the clock -- meaning that there is some variation in the time between clock pulses? Imagine the DAC is reproducing a signal that is rising an equal amount from one sample to the next. With a regularly spaced clock, you can draw a straight line through the corners of the stair-stepped output. However, what if one of the clock pulses arrives early? The DAC with switch to the next voltage level early, so one of the step corners will be shifted over to the left of the straight line. After the filter smooths out the corners, that section of the output signal will be slightly higher than it should be. So, for a rising signal, an early clock pulse results in output that is too high. A late clock pulse results in output that is too low. For a falling signal, the results are just the opposite. The end result is that noise in the timing of the clock pulses gets translated by the DAC into voltage noise in the output signal. Why is it especially a problem with SPDIF? well, the more noise that you pick up in the clock signal, the more jitter will result. Ideally, you'd like to generate the clock right next to the DAC so that you've got the least possible chance to pick up additional jitter. Then you can send the clock signal all the way back to the transport to tell it how fast to send out the data. The transport doesn't care about jitter, it's just moving bits from one place to another. The exact timing doesn't matter except at the DAC. But with SPDIF, the clock is supplied by the transport and sent over a coaxial cable along with the data, and then separated by the receiver and sent on to the DAC. There is plenty of opportunity to pick up jitter there. In an ideal world, the receiver would be able to filter the heck out of the clock signal it receives and restore it to exactly equally-spaced pulses. In the world of consumer audio, that doesn't seem to be the case, and jitter that comes from the transport or is induced by noise in the cable driver, the cable, or the receiver, arrives at the DAC and creates corresponding voltage noise in the output signal. I don't know whether the amount of jitter present in most systems is enough to produce measurable differences in the output voltage, or for that matter, discernable differences in the sound. However, what I've described above is the theory, and the mechanism by which jitter *can* cause problems in DAC (or ADC) circuits. -- John Stimson John Stimson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=218 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
norderney Wrote: I have been thinking of getting a 1Tb external Lacie drive. Lacie seem to be the only people making 1Tb external hard drives. Do I have any other options other than Lacie for 1Tb? thanks andrew smith If you do go down the Lacie route I would strongly recommend backing it up with another make. I have had 2 years of absolute mayhem with a 500gig that just keeps on failing. Error code 10's, delayed write errors, device fails to start, causing crashes, other error codes, and also a mechanical failureoh and and two suspected psu failures, - just to name a few of the problems. I shall be recieving it back for the 4th time soon and believe me, nothing important will be going on it! I will probably pull it apart and stick the hdd's in other housings and go from there. -- Deaf Cat Deaf Cat's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=515 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
That's what the Altmann UPCI does - it strips out the SPDIF clock and injects a new clock right at the input to the DAC... -- Phil Leigh Phil Leigh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=85 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
norderney Wrote: I have been thinking of getting a 1Tb external Lacie drive. Lacie seem to be the only people making 1Tb external hard drives. Do I have any other options other than Lacie for 1Tb? Well, the LaCie probably isn't really a 1TB drive. It's actually multiple drives in a box, striped so it looks like a 1TB drive. These have their pluses and minuses. Plus, they're big. Plus, striping makes them appear fairly fast. The downside is that if one drive in the box crashes, you lose all your data (and not just half, due to the way data is spread across the two drives). Thus, if you have 2 drives in there, your odds of losing your data are twice what you'd have with only a single drive. Eric -- kolding kolding's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=31 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
Create a RAID 1 setup (i.e. mirroring), load all of the music on the array. Break the array, and store the mirror copy in the closet until the active drive fails. -MrD -- MrD MrD's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=6099 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
I personally also like seagate drives. They are quite quiet, and have a 5 year warranty. A great resource is www.storagereview.com. They have a reliability survey that I encourage everyone to use. Lots of times there's not a whole lot of data for a particular drive, but if there is a lemon out there it generally shows up pretty quickly. -- leko leko's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=6040 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
norderney Wrote: I have been thinking of getting a 1Tb external Lacie drive. Lacie seem to be the only people making 1Tb external hard drives. Do I have any other options other than Lacie for 1Tb? no-one make 1TB drives. the largest capacity *single drive* is the Seagate 750gig. The lacie Big Disk or whatever it is called is really just two 500gig drives in one case. The controller basically uses RAID-0 to stripe them together to give the appearance of a single 1TB drive. If you look at the dimensions you'll see it is around twice the width of most external cases :) -- funkstar funkstar's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2335 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
I have been thinking of getting a 1Tb external Lacie drive. Lacie seem to be the only people making 1Tb external hard drives. Do I have any other options other than Lacie for 1Tb? thanks andrew smith -- norderney norderney's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=378 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
No one has mentioned this yet, but a slient drive would contribute benefit a good sound systm. I recall one of the users on this forum was using this Smart Drive Copper hard drive enclosure. http://www.3dgameman.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36104 -- agentsmith agentsmith's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1838 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
agentsmith Wrote: No one has mentioned this yet, but a slient drive would contribute benefit a good sound systm. I recall one of the users on this forum was using this Smart Drive Copper hard drive enclosure. http://www.3dgameman.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36104 Silence was a big issue for me when I built my computer recently. While I didn't go for a totally silent (passively cooled for example) system, you can get pretty close with simply a good case and judicious choice of components. This is the case: http://www.nexustek.nl/breeze.htm and I chose a low-noise CPU fan and a passively cooled video card. In the end, with the (adjustable) case fan at its higher setting the noise from the computer is inaudible more than about three feet away. I don't think the HDs make much difference (I now have three). -- opaqueice opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
ezkcdude Wrote: I use Seagate. Definitely do not go with Western Digital, if you value your music collection. Ditto on the Seagate. Very quiet and reliable. Hopefully this doesn't change since they bought Maxtor... -- earthbased earthbased's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=334 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
I'll chime in here, too, as I just had my first drive failure. I have 14 drives in my house right now, and just yesterday a 250GB WD in a Linux raid-5 setup (my music server, no less) died. My other Linux Raid-5 setup is all Seagate, as are most of my other drives. Never had a Seagate fail. On the plus side, this is my excuse to pick up a 1 TB ReadyNAS NV. NewEgg should have it here by Monday ;-). P.S., I now officially -love- raid-5. - Jeff -- JSonnabend JSonnabend's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=760 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
Manufacturers go in and out of favor. Most if not all have become notorious for one line or another. What I think is my most rational inclination is that hard drives from major manufacturers are are interchangeable commodities, and few of us have experience a with a large enough sample of enough different models to venture sound generalizations. However... I'm totally dedicated to Seagate 7200.9 drives and expect my next will be a 7200.10 (but spare me the 7200.8). -- axiomatic SlimServer Version: 6.2.2 - 7135 - Mac OS X 10.4.6 (8I1119) - EN - utf8 axiomatic's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3775 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
Clearly disks fail. You don't really want to lose all the work you put into ripping and tagging your collection, so if you are smart you will have a good backup strategy. With disks at about 33 cents/GB backing up to another disk is cheap and easy. What I've done is simple. I have a server machine that lives in a spare room. That is one of the big benifits of the squeezebox and means I don't have to worry about noise or heat very much. Internally, I have a 320GB drive that holds all my media, as my digital music collection grows it will probably just hold music. I bought this drive because it seemed the best balance of size and cost per GB at the time. I have the same disk in an external enclosure connected by USB. Once a week (or more if I am doing a lot of ripping) the internal drive is automatically backuped. That way I never forget. When my collection becomes to large to fit on the 320, I'll put the external one inside. By that time much bigger disks will be cheap and I'll get one of those to use externally. I prefer this solution to RAID because the most important thing RAID gives you is no downtime for a disk failure. I don't need that, but do like being protected from doing stupid stuff like accidentally deleting some important file. Or a virus. Other reasonable people feel the other way. Scott -- smnettles smnettles's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3332 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
Mitch Harding Wrote: I've been using the 120GB enterprise class WD drives in a RAID 10 array for a while now and haven't had any drive failures. http://www.wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?cat=2 And I certainly hope you won't have any in the future! -- ezkcdude SB3-Derek Shek TDA1543/CS8412 NOS DAC-MIT Terminator 2 interconnects-Endler Audio 24-step Attenuators (RCA-direct)-Parasound Halo A23 125W/ch amplifier-Speltz anti-cables-DIY 2-ways + Dayton Titanic 10 subwoofer He's not hi-fi, he's my stereo. ezkcdude's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2545 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
So far so good (a couple of yeas).But that's the main reason I also went with the RAID. I expect drives to fail eventually, but hopefully not more than one at once.My next step is to add a backup strategy, preferably in a different physical location. Then I will be content. On 6/13/06, ezkcdude [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:Mitch Harding Wrote: I've been using the 120GB enterprise class WD drives in a RAID 10 array for a while now and haven't had any drive failures. http://www.wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?cat=2And I certainly hope you won't have any in the future! --ezkcdudeSB3-Derek Shek TDA1543/CS8412 NOS DAC-MIT Terminator 2interconnects-Endler Audio 24-step Attenuators (RCA-direct)-ParasoundHalo A23 125W/ch amplifier-Speltz anti-cables-DIY 2-ways + Dayton Titanic 10 subwooferHe's not hi-fi, he's my stereo.ezkcdude's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2545View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616___ audiophiles mailing listaudiophiles@lists.slimdevices.comhttp://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
I've been using the 120GB enterprise class WD drives in a RAID 10 array for a while now and haven't had any drive failures.http://www.wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?cat=2 On 6/10/06, ezkcdude [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:I use Seagate. Definitely do not go with Western Digital, if you value your music collection.--ezkcdudeSB3-Derek Shek TDA1543/CS8412 NOS DAC-MIT Terminator 2interconnects-Endler Audio 24-step Attenuators (RCA-direct)-ParasoundHalo A23 125W/ch amplifier-Speltz anti-cables-DIY 2-ways + Dayton Titanic 10 subwooferHe's not hi-fi, he's my stereo.ezkcdude's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2545View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616___ audiophiles mailing listaudiophiles@lists.slimdevices.comhttp://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
My employer manufactures and sells broadcast graphics systems. Many of our systems have attached RAID 5 arrays in support of video clip record/playback capability. These run from 144 GB to 1 TB. Because of very high bandwidth requirements we can only use Seagate 15,000 RPM SCSI drives. For boot drives we tend to use Seagate 10k rpm SATA drives. Over the years Seagate has been proven to be the most reliable drives. We can look back and warranty repair/replacement records and know exactly which drive failed, when and why. When other manufacturers introduced compeitive 15k rpm drives we tested them, but none could touch the Seagates for raw, continuous throughput. OTOH, my three Tivo units have Maxtor PATA drives. All three failed. Two under warranty. I eventually replaced them all with another brand. Michael -- mgraves mgraves's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4078 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
I've had a Lacie external for the last 2 years and its been replaced once and repaired twice and its still playing up. So I'm looking elsewhere now as I'm a little disappointed to say the least with it's reliability. I'm looking at the ReadyNAS NV now which I think uses Seagate hdd's, which I think have the 5 year warrante, need to check. I've had an internal Hitachi 500gb backing up the Lacie, (the Lacie was supposed to be the back up ha!) Thats been fine - touch wood, fingers crossed. -- Deaf Cat Deaf Cat's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=515 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
snarlydwarf Wrote: Guess I should explain jitter for grins and cause I'm bored :P QUOTE] Great explanation! I wish I could go back in time and tell those early audio digital designers to check out what the computer industry was doing - a) error correcting codes on data streams and b) put a damn catalog of track information on the CDs! Of course, then we wouldn't have the anti-jitter industry or the music tagging industry... -- EricBergan EricBergan's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4746 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
blah509 Wrote: OK then...from a reliablity standpoint. What are the boards picks? I think it goes in cycles. Anyone remember Seagate's old problems with sticktion? IBM has been mentioned, they actually made great drives until the deathstar line. I'm seeing lots of dead Maxtors these days (I help a lot of neighbors with their computers), but not sure what the cause is. I'm not seeing the problems that some report with Western Digital. Have several of their SATA drives, both 10k and 7200 RPM, in various machines here with no problems in the first couple years. I'm pretty happy with current Seagates (use several big ones for backups), but my old 15000 RPM generation 2 SCSI Cheetahs are dying. But, as the old IT saying goes, there are only two types of drives - those that have failed, and those that haven't failed yet. -- EricBergan EricBergan's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4746 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
ezkcdude Wrote: I use Seagate. Definitely do not go with Western Digital, if you value your music collection. Too much of a generalization. The Raptor series from WD is both blazing-fast and quite solidly reliable; but their smallish maximum size makes them a suboptimal choice for the big-ass music archive. Brands go through their seasons of good and bad reliability, and lines and models within the brands can of vary. Back in the day, Seagate used to be pretty much the worst of the lot, especially compared to the brilliant efforts from CDC (Control Data Corporation). Then, a couple of years after Seagate bought CDC and incorporated their designers into the Seagate fold, the Barracuda line appeared and has been a performance and reliability high point ever since. Coincidence? Actually, despite this mild devil's-advocate stance, I have to agree that right now, if I weren't planning to try to do a lot of research into an individual drive model and just had to make a guess based on brand, I'd most likely plump for Seagate. In fact, it's Seagate disks I chose to populate my bare ReadyNAS NV with: a set of the ST3500641NS, from Seagate's Nearline series, which (at least as of when I made the purchase) seemed to be the preferred disk of some of the Infrant gurus for performance and expected reliabity if one were willing to pay the slight premium over Seagate's regular desktop line. There's of course a rub in that phrase expected reliability -- by the time really good real-world historical reliability statistics are out for a model, it'll have been discontinued and its size will seem hopelessly tiny by the new standards of the day. So you end up having to make a decision based on the manufacturer's statistical predictions, filtered through your sense of the maker's competence and integrity, with a sprinkling of intuition thrown in. -- jbm0 jbm0's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3949 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
With hard drives, you only care about noise, heat, and reliability. Only certain model of certain brand, namely old IBM glass disc drives, has higher than average failure rate. WD, Maxtor, Hitachi/IBM, and Seagate all have similar failure rate nowadays. If someone claims some brands are not good, that purely depend on their own experience. In that case, 1% means 100% for them. I have used various model and currently I have 9 HD's over 200GB for storage. Overall, Seagate is quiet, but again, it depend on model. Newer model tend to be quiet. I have an old Maxtor 80G which is noisest one but latest Maxtor 250G is realy cool and quiet. WD 200G model which first appear in market 4 years ago is really noisy, but their new model is quiet too. I would strongly recommend: 1. Don't run HD for music 24/7. No HD would last forever, if you are not listening to music, find out way to turn off HD you are not using. In that way, HD's would last almost forever. 2. Use fan for cooling, don't use passive cooling solution. Heat is hard driver killer! -- Roy2001 Roy2001's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5731 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
I've used a mix of Seagates and Western Digitals over the years, and none have ever failed. Luck, I guess... the fact is, any manufacturer can make a bad drive, but most drives made are fine. So this kind of anecdotal evidence is pretty useless for making an informed decision. Personally, my strategy is to go to Newegg or a similar site with many user reviews and try to select the drive with the highest or one of the highest average ratings. That way you at least have some better statistics, and you're unlikely to buy a lemon. -- opaqueice opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
Roy2001 Wrote: 1. Don't run HD for music 24/7. No HD would last forever, if you are not listening to music, find out way to turn off HD you are not using. In that way, HD's would last almost forever. Actually quite the opposite. It's powering up and down which puts the most strain on a drive (and other electrical components) - ever wondered why the _vast_ majority of drive failures happen at boot? -- radish radish's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=77 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
dean blackketter wrote: (My money's on Maxtor, that's the brand I've had the worst experience with.) Yeah, me too. I've had loads of them fail. In fact, that reminds me, I've got an RMA to create ... R. ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
Nope, not Maxtor, but I don't think we have any of those. As I alluded to in my original post, it's WD. It's surprising to me, because Seagate and WD seemed to have reversed in the last several years, in terms of reliability. -- ezkcdude SB3-Derek Shek TDA1543/CS8412 NOS DAC-MIT Terminator 2 interconnects-Endler Audio 24-step Attenuators (RCA-direct)-Parasound Halo A23 125W/ch amplifier-Speltz anti-cables-DIY 2-ways + Dayton Titanic 10 subwoofer He's not hi-fi, he's my stereo. ezkcdude's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2545 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
I had very bad experience with early (5 years ago) Maxtor NAS units. They were Windoze NT based and the software failed repeatedly. Not sure about reliability of individual hard drive units though. -- agentsmith agentsmith's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1838 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
The hard drive won't affect sound quality. If it returns bits different from the ones you put on it, it is broken. The only way that it would have any effect at all is if your PC was in your listening area and the drive was noisy. Look for 'reliable' (you don't want it to crash and eat your carefully ripped, tagged and organized music) and even with brand names that can be a crap-shoot: have backups of your music just in case your electricity burps and spits on your data. -- snarlydwarf snarlydwarf's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1179 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
then why spend thousands of dollars on different cd transports if the ones and zeros come out the same? The same argument can then be said for different digital interconnects such as Toslink and Coax can't it? They are just distributing ones and zeros, aren't they? Not being rude, just curious. g -- blah509 blah509's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1405 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
I use Seagate. Definitely do not go with Western Digital, if you value your music collection. -- ezkcdude SB3-Derek Shek TDA1543/CS8412 NOS DAC-MIT Terminator 2 interconnects-Endler Audio 24-step Attenuators (RCA-direct)-Parasound Halo A23 125W/ch amplifier-Speltz anti-cables-DIY 2-ways + Dayton Titanic 10 subwoofer He's not hi-fi, he's my stereo. ezkcdude's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2545 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
I actually do have a loyalty, to Seagate. I've been buying drives for a long time, and have long ago given up on WD. Maxtor aren't bad but they're very noisy, the Samsung's are pretty good though. But Seagate are quiet, large, often discounted and have a 5 year warranty (none of the others do for ATAPI drives AFAIK). -- radish radish's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=77 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Re: Best Hard Drive For Music Quality?
snarlydwarf Wrote: Guess I should explain jitter for grins and cause I'm bored :P A hard drive doesn't (assuming it works) have that problem: it has external timing. In addition to the 8-64 bits that it transfers at once (ld MFM drives like the ST506 transferred 8 bits at a time but they haven't been used on PC's in 20 years), there is a okay, the data bits are valid ... NOW! bit which is set when all the bits are driven properly on the bus, so the controller knows that it can read them. Timing isn't an issue: which is why you don't have to swap hard drive controllers when moving from a slow 3600rpm drive to a 7200rpm drive or faster. The timing is delivered with the data. The only thing you'd notice when swapping between fast and slow drives is that the disc is either faster or slower... the bits would still be the same. (And even a slow hard drive is fast enough to drive 44.1kbps.) Thanks for explaining most of the important bits (haha) Even better these days is SATA, which turns the bits into a stream of checksumed packets, which is even better. I will note that I once found a drive in a machine that would randomly corrupt 4 bytes of a file. I had a good copy of the file, would write it to disk, read it back and do a binary diff (hexdump+diff) of the two files.. same 4 bytes.. different each time I would write that one file.. that was messed up.. This is why I store all my music in FLAC. FLAC uses internal checksums to verify file integrity, you can use the command line utility flac -t to test. If you're really paranoid, you could generate md5sums of the whole file and store them redundant off-site.. maybe in a gmail account. md5sum *.flac | mail -s sums for $(pwd) [EMAIL PROTECTED] :) A good friend of mine makes his living building tube amps (shameless plug for atma-sphere.com) and we had a long argument one night over single-speed belt-drive CD transports, and just using an IDE drive with cdparanoia. After much debate, he went off and did some tests, and determined that riping/enoding to flac, and playback through a good digital output card to a good quality dac (he uses a bel canto dac 2) is one of the best solutions. I also was talking to him recently about the bel canto dac 3.. which has a USB input, which should eliminate the whole no clock problem with SPDIF. :) -- SuperQ SuperQ's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2139 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=24616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
