Do external hard drives effect sound quality?

[jon]

Excluding ssds and obvious factors such as a fan/mechanical noise and reliability, in a world where 'everything matters', do different drives impact on sound quality?

 

Ie is there any audible difference, or tendencies for drop outs, between usb , firewire, ethernet or esata or can power supplies and connecting cables add more noise to the computer and then onto the dac?

 

Like the previous post, does speed matter or the size of the cache?

 

I'm hoping the answer to all of this is no, it makes no difference but so far computer audio has not been so straight forward.

 

[bordin]

As long as the storage delivers perfect bits (that what any storage device is designed for), the sonics depends on other components of your audio system.

 

The main factor is the sound card or DAC, assumed the software player also transmits perfect bits in timely fashion to the audio device.