Hi Juan,
I'm attempting to plan out my new PC. I'd like to copy exactly what you're doing with all drives. I'm worried that your setup is too complicated for me to operate even after initial setup.
What are your thoughts? I like your idea of keeping all things consistent -playback drive- so that SQ can be consistently optimized. Thanks
Bob
Hey Bob, it could seems complicated but it is not. I´m going to let you know how I have the hdd set up right now. To operate this setup later is easy because XXHighEnd is doing it for you, the only thing you have to do is to configure XX correctly, which although it is not a minor thing you are going to find the necessary help here in the forum.
These are my hard drives:
1- The hdd with the OS and XXHighEnd (WD VelociRaptor 300GB. Looking at the pictures this is the only one horizontally placed))
2- One hdd with music that I always want have at hand. This hdd have all the albums that for one reason or another I want to have all the time at hand. I have a lot of albums here and are classified by genres. This is a personal classification but for me is ok (WD Green, 2Tb):
- Classic Piano
- Classic Piano concertos
- Classic Symphonies
- Classic Violin and Strings
- Classic Violin and Strings concertos
- Classic Voices and Opera
- Classic others
- Downloads (HDTracks, HDTT, Blue Coast, etc.)
- Folk
- Jazz (classic)
- Jazz (slow, all kinds of jazz)
- Jazz (modern)
- Rhythm and Blues
- Voices (men)
- Voices (women)
- Voices (mix)
- Other ones of interest
- Special selection
- Pop (groups)
- Rock (groups)
- Burning and test albums
3- One hdd that is hot swap connected/disconnected with a specific kind of music, e.g. Classical, or Jazz, etc. You can have as many hdd as you need and you can just take out one and put another with the music you want to listen at a certain moment and that you don´t have in the hdd nº2. Well, this is going to be the logical configuration that I´d like to have for this hdd in the future, depending of the amount of music I´ll have but in reality I only have so far one hdd full of music of all kinds alphabetically ordered. (WD20EFRX, 2Tb)
Let me tell you that as a general rule I use WAV files mostly for the albums that I use more frequently or that I like more, although of course I have a lot of music in flac files.
4- One hdd that I use as Playback Drive. This hdd is externally connected to the USB 3.0 PCIe card (WD RE4 WD5003ABYX, 500Gb). I used several different storage units as Playback Drive like an Usb 3.0 pen drive or different hdd but I ended up using the WD RE4 and I´m very pleased with the sound I get with it. The Playback Drive is important for two reasons, first because it eliminates the differences in SQ (if any) that the Flac or wav files could have and second the Playback Drive conditioned the SQ, I mean the sound is different if you use a pen drive or a ssd or a hdd and even the kind of hdd and more even depending the kind of connection. As could you imagine the number of combinations is infinite but as I tell you I´m very satisfied with the SQ of my WD RE4 connected via USB 3.0 to the USB 3.0 PCIe card.
5- An SSD for the Galleries. It makes a fast access to your albums but at this moment I don´t use it.
As you can see I don´t use a remote to control the Music PC but instead a keyboard, a mouse and a VGA monitor. To get better sound, once the music is playing, I turn off the monitor and also disconnect the USB 2.0 (keyboard and mouse) from the hub (see pictures).
About fans, I only use two of the three fans that I have at the bottom of the case (the middle one and the right one), no fans in the cpu cooler even when I use Ultimate Tweaks that are very demanding. My temperature oscillates between 29ºC and 40ºC (Room temperature 23ºC). That means less noise and less interference.
Here you have some pictures where you can see my Music PC with the hdd inside and outside. I also have a CD Rom but I have it disconnected and I don´t use it. When I want to rip a cd I use other computer and later I copy the file to the Music Pc.
Please ask whatever you need to know, I´ll be glad to help as much as I can.
Best regards
Juan