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Don’t play music from USB drives and Network

I want to clarify this subject further on why they should be avoided. This also applies to Windows on USB flash drives. My insights are as follows:

1. Best design is when soundcard has lions share of PCI bus use.
2. All soundcards (USB, Ethernet or PCI) operate of PCI bus.
3. USB drives and Network Drives (which also connect to PCI bus) goes against this design principle as data traffic now competes for PCI bus use.

PCI read or write transactions take place between master and slave devices (soundcard, CPU…). All devices connected to PCI bus can act as master or slave. During a read or write transaction, master takes control of bus and STOPS all other devices from transacting. This is where a conflict arises – soundcard wants more data for output BUT PCI bus is busy with a data transaction (from USB drive or Ethernet) thus forcing soundcard to wait. This all happens at frantic speeds but for ultra low latency playback, this conflict will have impacts.

Hence, I prefer internal laptop SATA drives where mobo maintains dedicated bandwith for data flow. A further improvement is to use SATA RAID 0 which does away with IDE – this is my current setup using 2 Seagate 5400.3 160GB drives.

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