Rsmaximasr

If it takes 10 seconds for the raid to write data to a hdd, you got other problems. Raid IO operates in the ms range, not in the seconds range. we all buy consumer grade hdds and we all buy consumer ssd/nvme storage. And there are many many reasons enterprise class ssd/nvme storage is better (I worked for the largest hdd/ssd/nvme manufacturer in the world) but nobody would want to pay the difference in cost. You can buy enterprise grade ssd/nvme technology in the used market pretty cheap, but you don’t know how long it will last.

I hope you are using a fiber network when using a backup on the net. 20-30Mbps would never work for me. Using mostly Mac’s with 1 dedicated as a server hidden in the house, Roon uses a couple of SSDs and nvme drives off the server, which Roon ARC uses for streaming over the net to the cars and remote locations. All in-house devices are backed up to the server using Time Machine to a large hdd. Every quarter, I take the current time machine backup hdd, unmount it, and store it in a safe that’s fireproof and water proof. I then attach an older Time Machine hdd and start the backup process all over again. Important data is stored on the server and not on the desktop Macs. Somebody stated using a single server/appliance for a nas is the easiest way to go. Using a single server/appliance has many single points of failure which isn’t good. I have my Roon music files (thousands of ripped cds) duplicated on a few different macs. Disk is cheap, and since I stream 99.999% of my music from Qobuz, I don’t need to buy any new cds, and if I do, they are replicated to multiple remote disks.

Are these still for sale? Do you have the original boxes, cables, and manual?

What I don’t get is why somebody is trying to improve the source drive when the data read has to pass thru many different pieces of hardware (l1, l2, l3 caches), and memory, what do you think you will get from the femto ssd? Thats like an electrical utility putting a device at the dam/generator to make the power source pure when the facts are that power source will go thru many transformers/substations which degrades the quality of the power. Also, I’ve done many tests comparing enterprise hard drives, consumer hard drives, enterprise nvme/ssd, and consumer nvme/ssd as the source drive for Roon and you couldn’t tell which source drive was being used.

When you write to a hard drive, you are writing to the drives cache and then it is written from cache to the actual drive. If there are problems writing the block of data to the drive, it is tried a few times before it will write to another sector, this takes tens of milliseconds, not seconds. In audio, we are talking about write data once and read it thousands/millions of times, so we are more concerned about the read speeds. This is why you use a program like Roon or audirvana that has an index of the disk locations of each audio track, and this index is best to have in memory. Also, when you play music from disk/ssd, the system will do read ahead and cache the data so it’s in memory when it’s turn to play.

I worked at 1 of the leading solid state technology manufacturers in the world (pcie, ssd, nvme: all enterprise grade components, not your cheap stuff we use in our computers), and I will ask some of these engineers if the tested any of their products for audio sound quality. Since the same firm is the largest hard drive manufacturer, I’ll ask the same question about their hard drives. I ran into an audiophile manufacturer at an audio show that told me this was the best sounding hard drive in his testing and only used these in his products. I asked him which drives he tested. I told him who I worked for and some of the disk drives were the same exact drive, just different labels on them. We made drives that others rebranded with their logos. There is only a few manufacturers that make hard drives but there are dozens of manufacturers labels on them.

Most of the people who buy into bogus technologies want to believe that they hear a difference so they don’t look bad after spending hundreds/thousands of dollars. I have friends that have hundreds of thousands of $$$ invested in their audio system and they sound like $&&$, and they keep spending tens of thousands trying to make it sound better (maybe they need femto m.2 nvme devices), but they sure like bragging about their $100k turntables and $200k speaker systems.

“Have always been on the fence about running OS in RAM vs off the Optane drive... RAM was more incisive but Optane was smoother.“ You do know that the OS executes from ram not any kind of disk, maybe you don’t. Just like all music files, they are read from storage or maybe some cache then loaded into memory before output thru some Ethernet/pcie/usb/other protocol. This is why the theory of making a nvme/ssd “audiophile” quality is bogus. What is an audiophile device/ssd/nvme going to do for you when that data (OS, file, data) is read into memory? Now somebody will think they have to make audiophile quality memory sticks!!!

That could be if you are using usb. But usb has terrible sound quality compared to the better protocols. For usb, you can say that using a reclocker, femto clock, cable splitting the data/power, and other tweaks/gimmicks will improve the usb sq, and you would be right. I’ve been there, done that many years ago, and I sold all of that @&$& along with the usb dac and got a very good dac using the better input(s).

There is no such thing as a good usb anything for audio. USB is a flawed interface and the better dacs / streamers don’t include usb

IMO, usb is a flawed technology to be used in a dac. For over a decade, I can count dozens of so called usb tweaks/gimmicks to try to make usb sound better. I tried/used a lot of them. Some of them, inside the dac, most outside the dac, did sound different, but nowhere close to analog. It wasn’t until I got rid of the usb dac and went with a quality dac with i2s and Ethernet that I could get rid of all my usb junk, and actually allowed me to get rid of all my analog gear. Maybe in the future someone might come up with a usb interface that sounds great, but in the meantime, enjoying my non-usb setup

And many people think they can hear improvements in sq when they spend thousands of $$$ in usb gimmicks/tweaks.

If macs are so bad, why do most recording studios use them? You would think nobody would want to introduce noise in the recording. Here are a couple of replies from recording engineers regarding macs in recording studios: ‘Just re-iterating the two other answers here. I’ve never been in a professional studio that isn’t running a Mac as their DAW machine. I must have been in a couple of dozen in the last ten years. A well maintained Mac that isn’t attached to the internet is pretty much bullet proof. These days PCs are similarly reliable and capable, if taken care of, but the Apple has built up an awesome amount of goodwill and has a great reputation among the audio community.’ ”I think I have only ever been in one studio in the last twenty years that has been using a PC for music production, although they have frequently been used as the basis of many DAWs and mixing consoles. But as far as running ProTools, its always Macs. And I’ve never been in a professional studio that uses any software other than ProTools, Logic, Nuendo, Cubase or Digital Performer, all primarily Mac based music production applications. So the short answer to your question? 100%.”

Just because somebody says doing X will boost your sq, doesn’t mean it’s true. You have to judge the change yourself. I did a test between 2 servers a few years ago: mac vs. enterprise server costing high 6 digits with 256G ram, ecc memory, many Intel procs, over a dozen enterprise ssd/nvme/m.2/pcie sss, using Ubuntu with Roon, the sq wasn’t any different. The enterprise server sounds like an airplane taking off because of all the fans going full throttle, but since both servers were located in a different part of the house, you couldn’t hear any of the noise. Plus, all of the noise coming from the enterprise server didn’t have any impact on the sound coming out of the Ethernet port going to my dac. After reading part of this building a diy server, I stopped when I saw 1 statement: using usb! Here is someone spending time and some decent money on a server trying to eke out the most sq from a custom server, and he is using the worst interface to a dac: usb. How many tweaks is this guy going to apply to usb to try to get better performance out of usb? Most of the audiophile community use usb because their cheaper dacs is all they have. So they buy a usb dac then spend hundreds or more $$$ on reclockers, ifi cables, separate boxes, whatever they can get to improve the sound. I was there many years ago and sold all that crap. Now, some of the better dacs aren’t even including usb and if you’ve seen many reviews of dacs over the last few years, the reviewers have preferred the sq using the non-usb inputs. So if I see someone with ideas on how to improve sq of a music system but they also use usb, I stop reading at that point.

I worked for 1 of the largest hdd and solid state storage manufacturers in the world and I worked in the solid state technology side of things. At an audio show many years ago, I had an audio manufacturer tell a group of people that he can hear the difference in sq between hard disk drives and he only uses a specific drive in his equipment. I looked at the drive and told him that drive is actually made by us and rebranded. So in reality, if he heard a difference between the original manufacturers drive and the rebranded drive, he was full of *&^%, they were the same drive with 2 different vendor names.