External Vs Internal Hard Drive

[mikelm]

My PC has two internal Hard drives so I have the option of storing music internally or externally.

Do we know of any pros or cons for each of these options ?

thx

mike

[PeterSt]

Hi Mike,

so I have the option of storing music internally or externally

Do you mean "inside or outside the OS disk" ?

[mikelm]

Do you mean "inside or outside the OS disk" ?

Hi Peter,

No, I have 2 internal HDs and ( at present one ) external seagate "free agent go" 500gb HD

int HD 1 with OS and some other data
int HD 2 with only music
ext HD 3 general back up including music

But as all my music is stored as WAV I may well exceed my internal capacity soon so I am thinking should I switch to making my ext HD my working music storage location.

So I wonder are there any drawbacks to playing music from ext HD compared with my current arrangement.

mike

[PeterSt]

Allright. Well, as far as I am concerned for SQ it wouldn't matter (others, especially at other forums and other players may have a different opinion on this). BUT :

It sure would matter for speed. So, the internal hdd will always be much much faster than anything you'd have outside. And thus I guess that will be your argument to decide for (left or  right ).

Is that satisfying for an answer ?
Peter


PS: I sure would try to play from your external hdd right now, just to see whether you receive gaps where you don't want them. Because even that too (gaps during playback) could be happening.

[mikelm]

I tested my all hard drive read speeds with a little program called HD_Speed.

int HD 1 with OS             60Mb/s but with serious glitches fairly often
int HD 2 music only         60Mb/s steady performance
ext HD 3 backup             32Mb/s steady performance
SDHC in USB card reader  12Mb/s steady performance
old USB pen drive           0.6 Mb/s steady performance

So I feel quite hopeful about my seagate ext HD at 32mB/s but this is a non expert guess

Do we know what an acceptable speed would be ? Of course i will try it with actual music but I am curious to see if the is a standard we should aim for

thx

mike

[PeterSt]

Mike, I don't know what an acceptable "throughput" speed would be. I tried your HD_Speed, but it doesn't want to work on any PC here so I don't have a reference for you. The 60MB/s doesn't seem all that fast to me, so I guess that must be on the low side already.

But why don't you replace the internal music disk with a 1TB one ?
(if not done already hehe)

[mikelm]

If you are running AVG HD_speed does not work and AVG reports a virus. I'm moving away from AVG for various reasons.

Logic suggests to me that for my files, that are nearly all .WAV, 44100,16bit, 2 chnl, I will need 1411200 plus some control data - let's say 2Mb/s.

I will test for all the above drives to see if my theoretical calculation matches reality.

I can understand that the OS drive should be as fast as it can possibly be so that mechanics of computing does not slow down flow of data but do the data drives really have to be as fast as possible ?

I will post my findings here

Perhaps I will invest in a solid state 100gig HD for OS only - and use remaining drives for data

[PeterSt]

Mike,

If you want the OS to benefit from "disk speed", stuff an SSD in there. Good for SQ as well (voodoo tricks, so don't ask me about it, but it helps).

No, it is the music disks needing the (transfer) speed;
If you want to play one album - and do that Unattendedly (which is the advice) - it has to be read from disk (that's ~700MB), and when it's normal WAV that takes maybe 3 secs in my (modest) system. If it takes 10 ? still doable I think. But if it would be FLAC things start to be different, because now it also has to be written, and read again (although the latter will often go from cache). Anyway, a FLAC album in my system is done with in 8 secs or so.
If you also use the Normalized Volume, the files have to be read another time. And so on, because there's more.

When this all goes to slow you will be annoyed, or the data isn't there on time to remain gapless playback.

[praphan]

Hi Mike,

I am really new to this community.
I am running XXHE out of my son old dedicated game PC for two weeks now. I only use external HHD to store music on WAV format with USB link.
Music playback in unattended mode works perfectly fine without any glitch. The only observation I have is that the playback is done one album at a time only eventhough I placed more than one alblum in the playlist. This should have nothing to do with the transfer rate unless changing the song from one folder to another take more time. But it could be that I don't know how to play multiple albums.

Hope this help
From the new player.
Praphan

[PeterSt]

Hey there Praphan ...

I know you're not asking for help, but I want to offer it to you anyway ...

First off, I don't recognize this at all. However ...

If you are using Attended Playback (so, the GUI is always there) I can imagine something with this. Still I don't recognize it, but it's imagineable. This is related to the "timer" which looks when playback has stopped, and in 0.9z-2 this timer is too short. It will be ok in 0.9z-3 again (due shortly). But then indeed something must be going on like going from one folder to the other is more difficult than staying in the same; I never heard of that ! (but maybe it is just so).

If you are using Unattended Playback I can't imagine anything with it ...

One more thing : In the current version(s) it is not possible to add another track or album to the playlist while playing; I think Attended may dig it (depends a bit on the situation), but Unattended sure won't. So, if you are doing something like that, that will be the reason.
Btw, this *is* possible in 0.9z-3.

Let me know ...

Peter

[praphan]

Hello Peter,

Thanks a lot for your suggestion.
I will play around and report to you asap.

Praphan