Storing music on HDD or SDD?

Whilst there is no direct performance issue with HDD, there is a reliability issue.
I’ve just had a 4TB LaCie HDD give up on me after around 3 years of use.
An SSD will not have the same issues because there are no moving parts. I’ve moved my library onto a 1TB SSD and the reduction in noise is also noticeable.

Strong recommend to shell out the extra for an SSD unless your library is in the hundreds of thousands of albums.

I have a dedicated music server on my network, running a boot/os disk (500GB m.2 SSD) and two 4TB NAS rated HDDs in RAID1.

RoonOS and DB run off the SSD, while all music is stored in the HDDs. The roon DB gets backed up to the HDDs once a week.

Never had any performance complaints. The HDD’s do make audible sound as they spin (as others have said), however my server lives in my media cabinet which is in my main listening space. I cannot hear anything when the cabinet’s doors are closed (however it is a passively cooled system - the only parts making sound are the HDDs).

If you have a considerable amount of music then it may be worth considering HDDs, as the price per GB is still better than SSDs. However if you have max 500-1000GB of music then I would stick with SSDs.

An HHD will often show signs of failures impending failure over time, but an SSD will typically fail without any warning and often catastrophically.

In the case of SSD for roon music storage use its less of an issue as the SSD is predominantly in a DATA READ ONLY mode. This is not the case for Roon ROCK or Nucleus boot drives and are probably rather actively being written to often.

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When you say “typically fail” I’ve never had an SSD failure (touch wood), the frequency of failure is orders of magnitude lower.
And we’ve all got backups, right kids?

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Never Tempt Fate …

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Hi there

Just thought I’d add my thoughts on this, though it seems pretty much every angle has already been covered (so really depends where you have your NUC and any HDD relative to your listening needs). However, until SDD’s eventually get near HDD prices (in time they will) I’d still go for multiple HDD’s with multiple backups, as they’re cheap as chips (comparatively) and after you’ve put hours and hours of hard work into ripping your music etc, you always, always must make sure you have as many back up options as you reasonably can (whatever the technology) as they all fail at some point and you don’t want to get caught out.

Personally I use a QNAP NAS to store my music (as it has so many other useful functions too) and keep a separate device (Mac Mini rather than a NUC) to do the hard work required by Roon. This gives me masses of storage, plus multiple back up options for both all the data on the NAS, as well as the Mac Mini (and everything else on the network) and, if you’re super cautious, you can use a QNAP to even keep an off-site back up somewhere else, so you’re covered even if your house burns to the ground! :wink:

If you want to have the storage in a listening room, I have mine in one room as an endpoint as well, then SSDs are not as noisy as a hdd system.

Try that with 13TB of music … There is really no good reason to have your roon server in your listening unless you have no choice due to cabling etc or its able to be silent but even then I would still advocate using a streamer/roon endpoint.

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13 TB…. I guess if I had that I’d just run the storage on my NAS. If I wanted to have it local I’d just attach a 8TB SSD with TB or USB-C and one internal.

I only use the NUC local because it is silent, no need to buy another endpoint unless I must.

If you don’t subscribe to the USB DAC connected to a busy computer is electrically undesirable camp then I guess you are fine…perhaps until you get to try it via a networked endpoint designed for the purpose and deem it differently.

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How about using 1x SATA RAID controller with 2x m.2ssd drive?
Anyone tried this?

A RPi / Roipeee end point is so cheap as to be a no brainer. The isolation wins for me, my server sounds like a tractor but is rooms away

Each to his own

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A couple of points.
The study is from 2007. 14 years is an awfully long tome in semiconductor development.
The HDD fail at a rate 2.5 to 4 times more than SDDs, that’s hardly “a bit” higher.

I’m not sure that this is still true…at least for 2.5 in SATA drives. When I looked a few weeks ago the largest 2.5 in HDD was ~5.5 TB but I was able to buy an 8 TB Samsung SSD. Of course, it was a bit spendy at $699, but 8 TB is also a lot of music: ~20k CDs if ripped to FLAC. That’s a library approaching a quarter of a million tracks.

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HDD failure rates are very much drive dependent and they have improved significantly over the years. One of the best running drive comparison studies is published by BackBlaze:

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

Overall lifespan varies immensely between consumer and enterprise class drives.

SSD failure rates depend very much on the quality/cost of the drive. Your average consumer drives are rated by TBW (terabytes written) and this is normally a few hundred times the drive capacity, so for a 2 TB drive for instance, it may be 1200 TBW or a 5 year warranty, whichever comes sooner.

If you compare a top-level enterprise SSD with 3 DWPD (drive writes per day) endurance over a 5 year warranty, then for a 2 TB drive this equates to 2 TB X 3DWPD X 365 days X 5 years = 10950 TBW, or almost 10 times the lifespan of the consumer drive.

It’s difficult to say whether HDDs are more or less reliable than SSDs. It depends what you do with them. Are they in a read intensive or write intensive environment or do they have a balanced workload?

When you’re talking about a single drive in a NUC it’s all moot. You’re going to have a 100% drive failure rate eventually, so a backup strategy is essential.

Personally, I prefer SSDs for my particular setup (multi-drive NAS arrays). They’re faster, they’re quieter and they consume less energy. Enterprise class versions are eye-wateringly expensive though and currently very hard to get hold of.

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Roon seems to do a lot of drive access for the database and I assume metadata updates are being written often on a large library…not sure if this is having an impact on DIY or Nucleus SSDs longevity.

HDDs are not dead yet! :slight_smile:

20TB on a single drive. Another article quoted WD as expecting 50TB in the second half of the decade.

This is one of many reasons to use a different physical device for the boot drive of the system running Core than you use for music. In a Nucleus or ROCK build, Roon OS boots from an NVMe SSD (lots of write activity). Those desiring internal storage for music will typically use a separate 2.5 in SATA SSD. Writes to the latter are uncommon…typically only occurring when you add music to your library. Given the very low write activity, the internal SATA SSD should last a good long time.

Roon accessing the music drive is all about READ’s not writes, its the Boot drive that gets clobbered with the database.

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