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RE: with the data going over the SATA cable to RAM

The SATA cable is involved only when the data is loaded into RAM.

On the face of it, that would seem almost self-evident but it's not, in my experience, the whole story.

My audio PC uses a good embedded mobo (Fit-PC2) with a John Swenson designed (i.e. good) C-L-C PSU and two TPR regulators, one at 12v for the CPU and another at 5v for the SSD. The Win_XP OS is "slimmed" to within a inch of its life - data are read off the SSD at boot time only. I use RBCD files exclusively without upsampling. There is no KVM - music and control data are passed via LAN. (Though the system hangs at the end of the current track, I have in the past switched off the SSD during play without ill-effect. That persuades me that the SSD is not accessed during play.)

The drive would normally be powered via the mobo's SATA socket but I provided a dedicated 5v line as much, to be honest, because it was cheap and easy to implement as the result of any systematic testing.

Not long ago, wanting to pinch the 5v regulator circuit to use elsewhere, I popped the SSD back into the Fit-PC2. There was an unexpected but dramatic drop in SQ. The SATA interface might well not be passing data but it was certainly doing something deleterious - the drive was back on its 5v reg PDQ. I cannot say how "busy" SSDs are when nominally idle but my guess is pretty busy.

Bits-is-bits wallahs can ignore the issue as they choose but I was certainly reminded of it on this occasion.

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