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In Reply to: RE: Inferior sound from USB external drive? posted by Tony Lauck on October 20, 2014 at 12:32:38
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.
Follow Ups:
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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