Solid State Hard Drives

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SSDs are very noisy from an electrical standpoint but unless you have room to fit in a SATA filter then there's nothing you can do about that.

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I will only use SSDs due to performance and bieng silent. However, the impact on SQ they have is significant — not huge, but definitely easily noticeable, the usual low-level noise that muddies / smears the sound. Through reading CA and verified through my own experimentation, the impact on SQ seems directly related to the power line of the SSD.

 

I’ve found two ways to deal with the SQ impact:

 

1. A USB-to-SATA splitter cable. This cable has a SATA power+data connector on one end which splits into a eSATA connector for connecting to a SATA port (with the use of a little eSATA to SATA adapter) of the motherboard, and also into a USB connector which it uses solely for powering the drive. I run the USB line via extension cable out into another room and plug it into a non-audio circuit via a simple USB charger. This way, not only is the SSD noise isolated from the PC, it also does not get into my dedicated audio circuit.

 

2. SotM SATA filter. This unit just plugs directly inbetween the SSD and power supply power connector. I haven’t attempted to A/B it with the above method yet, but it obviously works compared to the raw SSD.

 

You can experiment with the first method because it only costs a few dollars to try.

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I’ll never ever go back to HDDs. It’s not so much the raw throuput speed but the access times — SSDs, especially the high performance ones, absolutely wreck the fastest HDDs in terms of I/O speed. The latest M.2 devices are much faster still on paper, but I found that in my main PC (Samsung 960 Pro) general computing is faster compared to a high performance SSD but not by a large amount.

 

SSDs are important in your music server if you value a quick, seemless and high-SQ experience (provided you properly deal with the power noise issue). HDDs are the distant past, ignore.

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The memory modules in a SSD, just by operating, generates a lot of electrical noise which gets shoved down the power supply’s 5v rail. Now, the manner in which that noise screws things up from an audio perfective I’m not sure about — just as I’m unsure about how linear power supplies for a PC helps audio. However, the effect is real and I’ve verified it myself through testing. One of the things I tested was the SotM SATA filter which plugs into the power line only and doesn’t touch the data line.

 

I don’t want to overstate the SQ gain, though. It’s noticable and therefore significant, but it’s not HUGE. Dealing with SSD power noise is a feature of dedicated audio head PCs in which many things are done cumulatively to achieve peak audio performance.

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Guys, no excuses. SSDs only. You can get them off eBay and AliExpress if you can't benefit from Amazon. If you're serious about this hobby the SSD price premium is a drop in the bucket.

 

Only exception is if you have huge storage requirements that would cost you too much, in which case go get a QNAP or something with an SFP link to optically isolate it from your listening environment.