SSD for an old STi5

[mxb]

I have an old Small Green Computer sonictrasporter i5 (2016 model) in my music room with an external WD Elements 2TB HDD where my music library resides.

 

The drive has been totally reliable, but it is noisy and possibly slows down Roon.  

 

I noticed that 2TB SSDs from LaCie, Seagate etc are below $300 now.  Will they work with STi5?  Any recommendation which one to buy?

[davide256]

On 11/26/2019 at 12:54 AM, mxb said:

I have an old Small Green Computer sonictrasporter i5 (2016 model) in my music room with an external WD Elements 2TB HDD where my music library resides.

 

The drive has been totally reliable, but it is noisy and possibly slows down Roon.  

 

I noticed that 2TB SSDs from LaCie, Seagate etc are below $300 now.  Will they work with STi5?  Any recommendation which one to buy?

Call Small Green computers and verify if your machine supports a second internal drive in addition to the 64gb OS drive. You should be able to use

any SATA drive that fits the bays size and internal drives will have faster access speed than external USB (ie library scan rate). However SSD for media

drive vs HD has questionable benefits, your additional money is better spent on power supply upgrade

[bobbmd]

@mxb I recently replaced my WD 2TB HD with 4TB Samsung SSD HD but I have late 2012 i7 mac-mini 16GB RAM so don't know how it correlates with your Small Green PC but the Samsung is blazing fast quiet as a church mouse and as far as ROON is concerned IMHO it's not your HD or PC-- ROON is just SLOW especially loading(so I just leave on all the time now) and ver 1.7 I think is a vast improvement ie faster markedly improved features still like A+3.5.28 in a lot of different ways.

Did all this before my CFO allowed me my 'last rodeo'/system a Schiit Ragnarok 2(just the amp-- a real schiitload of headphone amp) Yggdrasil GS(GEN5USB) mated with Legacy Audio Studio HD monitors and unretired a Yamaha c750 sacd/dvd-a/cd/dvd changer and Harman Kardon fl8370 HDCD changer into the DAC for one and into amp for the other and also use Meridian Explorer2 DAC for comparison into the amp(but no comparison really)

bobbmd

[bluesman]

14 hours ago, bobbmd said:

ROON is just SLOW especially loading(so I just leave on all the time now

When I reviewed roon for AS last year, I installed it in all its forms on multiple operating systems on everything from an old (2005) Toshiba laptop to a new HP PC, and it's never been anything close to slow.  My daily listening rig is driven by ROCK on an i3 NUC, and it hauls butt on every task with my ~10k album library.  It powers up fast, displays graphics and text without delay, pulls info from the web when asked, and updates easily and quickly (e.g. the recent push to 1.7).  I do leave the NUC on 24/7 so I can listen to whatever I want in any room at any time, but that's only for convenience.

 

Unless your Mini is also in use for multiple non-audio tasks while listening, your library has hundreds of thousands of files, and you're using the most demanding possible settings for everything from album art to web sourcing of additional information, I can't help but wonder if you have a problem somewhere.  I assume your boot drive is a smaller SSD, as recommended by roon, and your big new SSD is only for your music files.  Your system architecture may offer a clue, e.g. is your big SSD in NAS? USB drive? Are all the pipes big, clean and clear - network? USB? Are you for some reason sending music files from that new SDD to your Mini over Wifi?

 

I wouldn't give up without a serious effort.  Roon is far better than you seem to be experiencing.

[bobbmd]

Hi@bluesman you are probably correct but other than that ‘loading’ problem which improved greatly with ver 1.7 everything else is great in either ROON or A+3 so I live with it