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In Reply to: RE: Inferior sound from USB external drive? posted by bean on October 20, 2014 at 09:12:07
I had an older XP machine with PCI slots and wanted to expand the number of internal hard drives. I got a new SATA to PCI card, but it turned out it was incompatible with my motherboard, due to different versions of PCI. Also, on older machines there may be problems with the BIOS ability to handle large drives. This is definitely the case if you try to go beyond 2 TB drives. My machine was a dead-end, no way to add more drives without a new controller and no way to add bigger drives without a new controller and no suitable controller that would work with the machine.
Hopefully, your machine isn't that ancient, but something to keep in mind. Good luck!
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Follow Ups:
I am going to try an adapter that fits on the back of the SATA drive - see link below. Avoids the PCI card controller; will see how it works.
Going to use a 1TB Western Digital blue for now; it's cheap. Haven't got that much ripped yet.
Machine is old enough that I'll have to remove the floppy drive to get a free IDE slot
The WD Blue drives are 7200 RPM. If you haven't purchased the drive yet, you might be better off with a WD Green drive. At 5400 RPM, it will be both quieter and cooler.
You might also just take the drive you have out of its external enclosure. If it's a Western Digital, it's mostly likely a Green drive. Then again, if you don't have a backup of your music library, you can use that external drive for your backups.
If I'm not mistaken, you won't be able to place a hard drive on a floppy drive cable/header. IDE floppy headers and hard drive headers are two different animals, with different pin counts. But you should be able to place up to two drives on each IDE hard drive header (and on the same cable). Typically, most older computers had two such headers, so could handle up to four hard drives.
I've never used a SATA to IDE adapter, so don't know if it will cause issues here, as one drive on each IDE header has to be designated as a master, and the other as a slave. Back in the day, this was done via jumper on the drive itself.
Thanks for the tips. I counted three headers; one each for HD, floppy, and optical. I am pretty sure the new version of the adapter has a switch, so I could probably put it on the HD header
I could pull the optical drive instead if needed. I don't rip on this machine
PC is stuffed in a vintage console, fan/drive sound not an issue
I am assuming that the existing hard drive on your old computer is small. You may well have problems with the BIOS that limit your use of the new hard drive. These may possibly even create the impression that the entire storage capacity is usable, leading to potential future data corruption when exceeding the actual limit. (It's been a few years since I investigated this situation, so I don't recall the details. But I know there's are real problems with some older gear and there are various size thresholds that, when crossed, can create problems. These may include drive size and volume size.)
Before loading any good files on your new drive, I would do some serious testing. First, I would do a full format, not a quick format. Second, if this succeeds, I would put lots of large files on the drive, enough to run out of space and verify that these write correctly without corruption. If these tests pass, then I would reformat the drive and start over. Alternatively, I would research the situation thoroughly, as there may be information about your specific configuration available or there may be quick diagnostic tests you can run to see what will happens.
In the end, I junked my machine. I even had to pay to junk it. :-( I didn't feel too bad, as the machine was truly ancient, having started out running Windows 98.
Another older Windows XP from 2001 had a hard drive failure and I replaced the hard drive with a much larger disk. It turned out that the BIOS for this machine would not support a single volume the size of the new drive, so I had to format two volumes. This machine still runs Windows XP, but ever slower due to application bloat. However, I have yet to get it to run a modern Linux distro. There seems to be a graphics driver problem...
Be prepared to junk your old machine and definitely be pleasantly surprised if you can get it to work.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
can be had dirt cheaply today. I retired a 2002 XP box four years ago with an i7-860 based box that screams. I just replaced the original 750 GB drive with a 2 TB drive that cost me the princely sum of $90. And I bought a second identical one for ghosting purposes.
I use a family of USB hard drives for backup purposes, but the transfer rate from them isn't nearly that of an internal SATA drive.
My SB server died as I posted. I'm going to find a new to me few year old machine w/7 and SATA drives. I'll ghost or back up to something either internal or USB. I guess internal will be cheaper and easier.
ET
> My SB server died as I posted. I'm going to find a new to me few year
> old machine w/7 and SATA drives. I'll ghost or back up to something
> either internal or USB. I guess internal will be cheaper and easier.
Yes, a bare internal drive will generally be a little cheaper, although probably not by a lot. External USB drives are are a popular consumer item and frequently on sale.
Easier? Not necessarily, as it entails opening up and installing the drive. That's pretty easy for many people, but not everyone. Attaching an external drive to a USB port is easy for anyone.
For backup purposes, though, using an internal drive in the same computer isn't a good idea. Something that goes terribly wrong in that computer and damages or wipes out the main copy of your library, could also wipe out your backup copy at the same time. Using an external drive and leaving it powered down (or better, unattached) between backups is a better solution. You could also backup your library across your network to disk space on another computer. Best practice, though, is to keep at least two backups, preferably one of them off site to guard against things like fire and theft.
Using Ghost or other imaging software to backup data isn't necessary, and my just make your backups very slow. You don't need an exact copy of the hard drive itself, just the files on the drive. A better solution may be to use file syncing software such as SyncBack or Robocopy (command-line) or SyncToy (GUI) from Microsoft.
My Acronis software backs up a W8.1 W7 dual boot computer in 5 minutes and restores in less than 10 using a boot disk.
You don't need an exact copy of the hard drive itself, just the files on the drive.
Unless of course you want to spend the next eight hours reloading the operating system, downloading all the updates and restoring all your applications and finally all your data.
Not I, thank you. I ghost the OS. And used it the week before last when I moved from the original 750 GB drive to a new 2 TB drive. I didn't have to deal with any of that time consuming crap.
Your choice. :)
> > You don't need an exact copy of the hard drive itself, just the files
> > on the drive.
>
> Unless of course you want to spend the next eight hours reloading
> the operating system, downloading all the updates and restoring all
> your applications and finally all your data.
>
> Not I, thank you. I ghost the OS. And used it the week before last
> when I moved from the original 750 GB drive to a new 2 TB drive. I
> didn't have to deal with any of that time consuming crap.
>
> Your choice. :)
Yes, drive mirroring is a good backup approach for the system disk. I was assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that he was speaking of keeping the library on a separate drive. I would never keep my media files on the same drive as the operating system unless the server was strictly limited to a single disk drive.
but by the time I added either a GOOD USB-SPDIF converter or a PCIe Juli@ card (the one I have is PCI), it's approaching $500. Need coax out to get 192/24 to the Marantz, USB only does 96.
$500 out of my already spent for the year audio budget. vs $60 out of the household budget to tweak the Dell
worth a shot
OK:
I seriously would NOT worry about the difference between 96 and 192k, there is almost no chance that you can hear the difference between the two at this stage.
OTOH there MAY be something to be gained (all other things being equal) by using a USB to SPDIF converter, if only because, like I said, coax right out of a PC/sound card may not give the best results (and I'm talking about perceptible differences...I've had a coax out of a HPackard PC once and it was just NOISY.).
Then again, whether this will be any better than the straight USB connection into the Marantz is, in your case, very questionable, because it sounds like your problem is the multiple USB slots necessary to get your songs to the DAC.
PC audio is in my opinion a huge can of worms, because most PCs are not built to prioritize audio only (they're there to surf the internet, etc.)
If I were to start from the beginning, I would probably just buy a Mac mini laptop setup with an optical out, and just not expect to put ALL of the music there. Just the stuff you like.
The 192 kHz downloads tend to sound better than the 96 kHz. At least that's my experience when I've been able to compare the different formats for the same album.
It's definitely worth the download wait and the storage costs, but whether it's worth the sometimes absurd price premium is something else. Some sites charge the same for all the hi-res formats, in which case it's a no-brainer to go with the highest available resolution.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
PCI slots are still common on many motherboards, so it shouldn't be difficult to find one that can accept your existing card.
PCI slots come in different versions, so they don't work on all motherboards, at least if the computer is very old. In my case, I was able to return the card.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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