Hi Peter, the quotes below are from your recent post about SQ of 8.1:
For the last many months I play with the music on a LAN connection somewhere; This was not setup for this 8.1 setup since 8.1 was upgraded from a native W8 (so, not from my normally used OS install - actually a fresh one though with basic normal settings (like you would use them).
Music was on the OS disk and all sounded OK.
From there I reasoned I would need the RAMDisk so I installed that. Just from MinOS while I thought it needed NormalOS ? anyway it worked. Set back the SFS to 4 and through the RAMDisk as Playback Drive (too) now all sounded on par with the playback through the OS disk as how it was at first.
I'm assuming that, "...how it was at first." refers to when you initially played 8.1 with the music directly on the OS drive and not the external disc. Because my music collection (mostly 16/44 wave files) is relatively small, about 900 gigs, I have been storing and playing music on a UEFI formatted, 3 TB OS disc since I put the computer together in the spring of 2012. When I put the computer together I tried every possible playback drive, except RAMDisc, and nothing sounded as good as music directly on the OS hard drive. Even creating a partition on the OS drive for music didn't sound as good as storing the music directly on the OS "C" drive in a "Music" folder. Anyway, I have so far resisted creating RAMDiscs for XX and playback drive because things have sounded so good here for a long time. Your experience, described in your quotes above, seems to confirm my "intuition" that I don't need RAMDiscs. Assuming I read your quotes correctly, do you think it would be worth trying RAMDiscs in my configuration?