Disk Caddy Without Internal Switching Power Supply

[ClothEars]

I have been using an external HDD (powered by a 12V linear power supply) loaded with my music files and connected via USB to my SOtM SMS-200 Ultra for quite a while now.

I have found to my surprise that different caddy's sound quite different and I have tried four to date.  They all have internal switch mode power supplies (buck converters I presume) and I was wondering whether anyone had come across one that only uses linear power converters/regulators.  Is it possible to build/modify such a device using only linear power supplies?  My hunch is such a caddy may sound better if it avoids internal switching power supplies.

[elan120]

I also experienced the same, but instead of connecting external HDD enclosure to endpoint, I connected to server via a USB Gen2 PCIe card.  So far, I have tried two different enclosures, they both USB 3.1 Gen2 powered by JS-2, and both has buck converter to drop 12V to 5V, but the second one use two linear regulators to convert 5V to 3.3V and 1.2V, and this one, coincidentally, also sound a bit better.  I later modified the first one with better clock, and its SQ is now surpassing the second enclosure.  In the next couple weeks, I plan on changing the buck converter in both enclosures to linear regulator as well as clock modification for the second enclosure to see if there are more room for improvement.

 

Btw, as a side note, although using USB 3.1 Gen2 enclosure only is quite nice, but once I added an USB 3.1 Gen2 PCIe card recommended by people I respect, powered by LPS-1.2, SQ clearly took another uptick. 

[Doak]

Yes,, as I put it “Everything makes a difference, unfortunately.” 

I’ve been using externally powered caddies for a couple of years now to feed my Auralic Aries. Despite Auralic’s contrary recommendation I find this to be a significant improvement over all other methods of transporting  music data to this streamer.  

Now here’s the funn part - as per my initial statement - all caddies sound different, the USB cables used sound different, the LPS units all sound different AND the drives used all sound different. Below is a photo of setup that’s been stable for over a year - a Sabrent caddy is powered by a decent Teradak unit ($130 or so), the drive is a hefty WD Black RE4-GP 2TB,the cable is .7m Supra. 

I’ve been through a number of permutations/combinations and this really hits the spot for me/my system. 

 

[ClothEars]

@Doak

I agree that everything makes a difference and have refined my external drive combo with carefully selected power cord, linear power supply, USB cable and HDD.  The last element for improvement is the disk caddy itself.  The best sounding one so far after 4 different ones is the Voyager S3 but I still think it would be good to get rid of the switch mode elements in them to improve sound quality.

 

@elan120

I have tried various combinations of network connections of my music HDD to my SMS-200 Ultra (i.e. SATA connection to server, NAS connection via router, etc) but none of them sound as good as a direct connection via USB and a disk caddy.  I prefer the open style caddy to an enclosure as I keep a second identical HDD as a backup and when I add new music files to this I then clone the drives in a dual caddy to ensure I always have a backup.  Using an enclosure would be much less convenient for this method.

 

It would be great if you could post some pictures of your modifications to the buck converters so I can get an idea of what's involved.