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In Reply to: RE: About the RAM disk solution .... posted by AbeCollins on November 20, 2014 at 11:48:52
I went to using a RAM disk because it bypassed using spinning rust. I was able to hear the noise made by the spinning rust while seeking. Also, I wanted to do the conversion from FLAC to WAV off line. If I had an SSD to use as a cache for music files then perhaps I would have done it differently. However, I don't think this is a good idea, as it creates a lot of write traffic to the SSD and may impact wear.
If your favorite player uses memory storage and this is done correctly it will be better to load the play list into the player's memory. This avoids processing the WAV file RIFF headers during real-time music playback. However, this is only feasible on a 64 bit operating system with lots of RAM if one has long playlists of high-res files. With this approach it is possible to completely suspend the operating system if the DMA controller for the audio output has enough addressing/counting capability.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Follow Ups:
Tony, when you do your FLAC to WAV conversion is that done 'on the fly' just prior to each music file being played? Or is it more of a batch process? I'm not sure I understand but it would make sense not perform a lot of unnecessary writes to the SSD, and doing your conversions in RAM will be lightning fast.
In most music server setups SSD write endurance isn't a problem because well over 90% of the operations to SSD will be reads. Besides, the endurance of MLC SSDs have gone up significantly just in the past couple years. So much so that the lines between MLC and SLC have blurred. Many enterprise class storage systems that used SLC SSDs have recently gone to MLC. SLC is already rare, very expensive, and likely to become unavailable in short order..... because it is too expensive and no longer cost effective.
I work as follows when playing FLAC files.
1. I open the folder containing the tracks of an album.
2. I select the tracks that I wish to play. (Typically several tracks, e.g. four tracks for four movements of a symphony.)
3. I right click on the selected tracks and Dbpoweramp converter converts these to WAV and stores them in the RAM disk.
4. I open HQPlayer and tell it to pick up all the tracks in the RAM disk.
5. I click play.
6. When done I close HQPlayer.
7. I clear out the RAM disk.
It would not be practical to do the conversion prior to each track as this would change the delay between tracks and add glitches to albums that were made to be played "gapless". The downside is that long play lists (e.g. Bach's St. Matthew Passion) can exhaust the size of the RAM disk that I have set up if they are hires. If this happened often I would upgrade the RAM disk from 4 GB to 8 GB, but then I would need to add more RAM to my computer, which presently has only 12 GB of RAM.
I have no idea whether or not SSDs have become reliable. They were not. As far as I can tell micro SD cards are still unreliable -- it's been only about two months since I lost data on one that was being used to do compiles and operating system updates on a Raspberry Pi. I recently got a 120 GB SSD that I am using on an Atom based NUC as a Linux server. This will get a pretty good thrashing due to data base updates. I will be pleasantly surprised if this device makes it through a year.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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