Furutechfan Posted October 24, 2012 Posted October 24, 2012 (edited) Just swap my hdd in my laptop with an 120gb intel 520 hdd. I am absolutely and totally blown away by the improvement across the board. Immediacy, impact, detail and darker background...more stable soundstage.....but the increased immediacy and impact......wow.... When you think about it, the hdd can introduce interference from the spinning motion and increased latency from being slower to read off. It's certainly the best $139 I have ever spent on hifi. The impact of changing from a hdd to ssd is larger than the $4800 I spent on my p10 ps audio power regenerator. Of course no hifi shop is going to tell you to buy a ssd cause they won't make any money from it. I have to thank the forum guys at jplay and Marcin from jplay for recommending the change over. Do it man...it's crazy good. Throw your hdd away. Ssd is now cheap enough to consider ! Edited October 24, 2012 by lyndonlim 1
LogicprObe Posted October 24, 2012 Posted October 24, 2012 I think I've been saying that on here for about 2 years............................about time you took some notice! ; ) Congrats! You can always use an external spinner for large video files etc.
Furutechfan Posted October 24, 2012 Author Posted October 24, 2012 Yeah...you are right I have about 6 tb of external hdd for movies and other stuff. I am still shocked by the improvement...its just one of those things that people don't shout enough about. I am changing all the hdd in my laptops to ssd as its just so much faster. I reckon a lot of people buy i7 processor not realizing that their hdd is the biggest bottleneck in the processing chain. I also think ssd was crazy prices 2 years ago so it was not really an affordable option. Now you can get a intel 520 for $139 and a 60gb one for quite a bit cheaper.
LogicprObe Posted October 24, 2012 Posted October 24, 2012 I'm running Fujitsu SATA 3 120GB disks. (my fellow doesn't stock them anymore but they look just like the Intel 520) They really fly. I really noticed the step up from Sata 2 to Sata 3.
Furutechfan Posted October 24, 2012 Author Posted October 24, 2012 (edited) Finally got the m2tech young driver to work with my jkenny spdif mk3 and it's he'll of a lot better than the kernel driver...less edgy...with the ssd installed I can for the first time tolerate Norah jones album I downloaded from hd tracks which isn't the best of recordings but there seems to be significantly less distortion and again....greater immediacy and impact but smoothness is retained..Greater sense of music flow is also evident. It's just another huge level up. Maybe that is why Mac users always report greater responsiveness over pc as a lot of the macs use ssd rather than hdd. I guess the benefits are directly attributed to reduced latency. Again...goes to show that the source quality is just so crucial to the end result. Crap in crap out. Edited October 24, 2012 by lyndonlim
LogicprObe Posted October 24, 2012 Posted October 24, 2012 I use an old 40GB sata 2 SSD for my Windows swap file!
Furutechfan Posted October 24, 2012 Author Posted October 24, 2012 Yeah...ive just discovered that its so easy to swap operating systems just by swapping the internal drives. Keep one for audiophile use and the other one when you need to do photoshop, PowerPoint etc.
LogicprObe Posted October 24, 2012 Posted October 24, 2012 Mine are all in my desktop..........but I know what you mean. I stuck another 40gb sata 2 into an old netbook, maxxed out the RAM and it goes near as well as the current Netbooks. Single CPU holds it back a bit though.
Furutechfan Posted October 24, 2012 Author Posted October 24, 2012 Hey do you think a fanless desk top performance will yield even better performance. Surely a spinning fan in a laptop will introduce its own magnetic and vibrational interference....compared to a completely silent desktop with huge heat sinks? Is there such a solution as a fanless desktop PC?
LogicprObe Posted October 24, 2012 Posted October 24, 2012 Hey do you think a fanless desk top performance will yield even better performance. Surely a spinning fan in a laptop will introduce its own magnetic and vibrational interference....compared to a completely silent desktop with huge heat sinks? Is there such a solution as a fanless desktop PC? Sure is. I build quiet computers for music studios and have made many fanless designs. I usually include a couple of case fans with an ON/OFF switch if they ever do get too hot. This runs fine without fans in a large case. 1
Furutechfan Posted October 24, 2012 Author Posted October 24, 2012 Wow..very impressive. How much would it cost to build one of these pc? Say with an i3 processor....
LogicprObe Posted October 24, 2012 Posted October 24, 2012 Not too much. The integrated graphics negates the need for a video card for starters.
DoggieHowser Posted October 24, 2012 Posted October 24, 2012 I just ordered a new MacMini with a fusion drive which looks pretty interesting. It's JBOD with a slight twist. Writes go to the SSD and the OS optimizes where files are located (on SSD or HDD) to speed up access. So it's not a cache (no duplicates) nor RAID and you get the full storage amount. Probably not ideal for music though.
LogicprObe Posted October 24, 2012 Posted October 24, 2012 This was an interesting board last year......... http://www.techspot.com/news/44747-gigabyte-z68xp-ud3-issd-motherboard-20gb-ssd-on-board.html My board used Gigabyte Extreme Hard Drive..........which was a combination of SSD and RAID 0 spinning disks................then SATA 3 came along! that fusion drive is just what I normally set up in Windows with my O/S on the SSD and other stuff on the large spinner. I'm running 5TB internal storage with a similar amount of of external drives.
bensl Posted October 24, 2012 Posted October 24, 2012 (edited) i am very close to buying a new mini to run as a htpc and run the squeezebox. i will prob just get the base model and connect an external hdd. any better small form one box options? Edited October 24, 2012 by bensl
LogicprObe Posted October 24, 2012 Posted October 24, 2012 i am very close to buying a new mini to run as a htpc and run the squeezebox. i will prob just get the base model and connect an external hdd. any better small form one box options? Have a look at this............... http://www.shuttle.eu/products/slim/xs36v/
Furutechfan Posted October 24, 2012 Author Posted October 24, 2012 Ahhh...I just Remembered the reason I chose not to go down the desktop route....it's the need to plug power to the wall. To me, stable power supply will impact the sound more than fans running on a laptop. Unless you could power a desktop with a battery. One of the strength is the ability to go off th grid and I can hear the difference when the power supply adaptor is switched off.
Batty Posted October 24, 2012 Posted October 24, 2012 Hey do you think a fanless desk top performance will yield even better performance. Surely a spinning fan in a laptop will introduce its own magnetic and vibrational interference....compared to a completely silent desktop with huge heat sinks? Is there such a solution as a fanless desktop PC? I built a desktop PC about 6 years ago using a fanless CPU cooler on an AMD 3200 processor, the only fans were Graphics (GTX6600) and PSU plus a large slow spinning one in the case, It has changed hands 3 times within the family and is still running, the graphics card has an adjustable fan too so can be slowed down for non intesive usage. The CPU cooler was a Thermaltake item with 6 heatpipes and a very large cooling fin area. Thought I'd mention this as an indication of reliability of fanless CPU cooling.
Juicester Posted October 25, 2012 Posted October 25, 2012 only issue with SSD - I had one die on me for no reason whatsoever, so the supposed reliability claim vs platter drives doesn't stack up in my books. other than that, yeah, it's impossible to go back to normal hd's once you've experienced the speeeeed.. from off-state to desktop i think i'm done in 15 seconds now
Batty Posted October 25, 2012 Posted October 25, 2012 (edited) Really fast boot up into Ubuntu Edited October 25, 2012 by Batty
TP1 Posted October 25, 2012 Posted October 25, 2012 This is interesting and a concept that I will try. I am using a dedicated music server ( Consonance Reference 7) with external HDD for music. I'm guessing I should get some form of improvement as well.
pelennor Posted October 25, 2012 Posted October 25, 2012 only issue with SSD - I had one die on me for no reason whatsoever, so the supposed reliability claim vs platter drives doesn't stack up in my books. other than that, yeah, it's impossible to go back to normal hd's once you've experienced the speeeeed.. from off-state to desktop i think i'm done in 15 seconds now This .. from what I've read online, the SSDs have a drive controller built in to them, and if it happens to fail, the BIOS won't even see that a drive is there, meaning you can't pull any data off them. Make sure that everything important on an SSD is backed up regularly!
peacewise Posted October 25, 2012 Posted October 25, 2012 I got two ssds in my htpc. Nice and quiet, quick boot, will never go back to hdd.
Jventer Posted October 25, 2012 Posted October 25, 2012 Is the SDD just for the operating system and applications or do you store the music files on there as well?
peacewise Posted October 25, 2012 Posted October 25, 2012 The ssd are the only storage in the pc, they do the OS, applications and music.
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