SSD's getting bigger and cheaper by the week

2k for something I can have for under 400 and have raid support. If that drive fails you loose the lot. Ive had 2 SSD fail on me due to powercuts so would not trust anything to one drive.

1 Like

I’m not in that camp :smiley: but silence would be nice in a server.

True…but if you back up to a NAS then all is OK…no matter where you have your music - on a single spinning or silicon based drive you still need a backup or 2.

Yup I had cloud and usb backup.

I can understand if you have you music server in the rack with your kit then it could cut down on RF/EMI and audible noise, but if you like me who has all the noisey stuff in a cupboard neatly tucked away in another room well away from the listening area it’s a bit moot.

Also having just conducted my own tests capturing the analogue output of my system to a digital recorder playing the same track from local usb stick, Nas via Lan and WiFi examing the captured waveforms and listening and switching seamlessly between them and could see nor hear any difference I conclude adding SSD would not improve my sq in any way.

2 Likes

Actually silence is pretty easy to achieve in a full case PC custom built. The available sound dampening cases, silent running power supplies, and silent fans make them dead quiet. Much more silent than any NUC. Even running a full desktop i7 instead of a NUC’s wimpy little mobile cpu. :grinning:

Funny thing:
By the standards of the computer industry, $2,500 is expensive.

By the standards of the audio industry, ho hum: Chord Hugo 2, Audeze LCD-3, PS Audio Directstream Jr, Mytek Brooklyn are not even the top products in those manufacturers’ lines.

It seems the Roon forum is split between the two worlds.

5 Likes

I wonder if the chatter that is being noted on NAS drive access by roon (assuming it is the cause) will cause ssd failures in time. While roon should only be reading data this might never be an issue. Be interesting to see. Might chuck a spinning drive in my NUC and place some music there to watch das blinkin lights :blush:

I’m also using a SSD-only setup. But only 1TB and the reason isn’t sound quality but avoiding movable parts and increasing durability. I’ve also read that SSDs save some energy. Well, my backups are still on spinning disks. :wink:

@maximasr Rick makes an interesting post here…Those who are hell bent on SSD for music storage will no doubt not be so interested perhaps…but everyone is entitled to their own opinion which of course is always right :wink:

The point about SSDs having limited write longevity is correct, but not relevant here.
a) The numbers are high. I just looked at a 1 TB Samsung SSD, with endurance of 600 TBW, i.e. the drive can be completely rewritten 600 times over the 5 year warranty period.
b) Music storage is perfect for SSD, because it is a write-once-read-many life cycle. We do not ever rewrite the music files.

1 Like

I have an SSD in my Mac Mini that backs up to a Synology NAS w/ HDDs. The SSD is silent, the HDDs in the NAS are loud enough to need to be sequestered in an isolated part of the house. The price per TB for SSD’s is falling fast enough that I’m not concerned about testing the limits of their lifespan. Both drive types still have their strengths, but I definitely don’t want HDDs anywhere near my listening room.

Call me crazy, but my Roon is running on a notebook with an SSD and the music is on a 6gb external hard drive attached to that notebook. The notebook is quiet because the fan never comes on during normal use and I hear nothing from the hard drive, even if I stand a foot away. If I did hear noise from the HD, I’d stream the music from my NAS in another room. I a
m not on a quest for quiet because I don’t hear noise from what is a pretty conventional, run-of-the mill system.

1 Like

Stereophile has a write up of a Music Matters event in Seattle (which coincidentally I attended). The prices of the gear mentioned range from $2,395 (Chord) to $270,000 (Linn), including $150,000 for cabling in one $700,000 room.

Except for Roon Nucleus at $1,398 — Roon is a bargain!

I use a 6 bay RAID array (RAID 6, because yes I have lost 2 drives). I would love to go SSD, mainly for power consumption. I seriously doubt any sonic changes at all.

100TB now.

Est. 15 years of music.
Or 45 years if you listen 8 hours/day.
Or 180 years of 2 hours per day.

That won’t fit in a NUC as its a 3.5" drive. But, those of us who have MOCK systems could easily use it as the data drive.

True but the time will come soon enough that maybe with demand spinning disks will be to expensive to manufacture and SSD will be the norm…form factor aside this will be a good thing.

:grinning:Well, spinning disks over the years have usually given me warning when they are about to go. The one SSD which crapped out on me, just died.:scream_cat: But, I guess that doesn’t matter much if we all do daily backups. We all do daily backups, right?:thinking:

3 Likes

Every 3-4 weeks for me. I add 9-10 albums a month, so the risk is tolerable.