Internal or External HDD/SSD for Streamer?

MotherSky

The stone that killed two birds
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That's interesting to hear. Aurslic charge £100 for the internal hard drive kit (no hd included) which is just ridiculous considering similar hd installation kits can be had for £5! Save myself some money and go with external then!

Did you compare an ethernet connection against wifi - with having the router so close by i was going to connect with ethernet as I believe this to be better than wifi. I have a dual band router so could do similar but my experience sways me to want to use ethernet over wifi.
I can't pretend that I fully understand all the variables, so you might have different results, but I tried the following: direct connection to the router; connection to the router via a Cisco ethernet switch powered by a linear power supply; and finally WiFi connection using the 5G band as described - the latter setup definitely sounded consistently better to my ears, but as this allowed me to have the router and accompanying paraphernalia sited elsewhere, this may have been a factor - I didn't really expect this result, and did go to a fair amount of trouble to optimise the ethernet connection - I even acquired some Supra ethernet cable for the final link to the Auralic, which did make an audible improvement, but ultimately found wireless connection to be preferable - YMMV as ever...
MH
 
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Smonks

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I can't pretend that I fully understand all the variables, so you might have different results, but I tried the following: direct connection to the router; connection to the router via a Cisco ethernet switch powered by a linear power supply; and finally WiFi connection using the 5G band as described - the latter setup definitely sounded consistently better to my ears, but as this allowed me to have the router and accompanying paraphernalia sited elsewhere, this may have been a factor - I didn't really expect this result, and did go to a fair amount of trouble to optimise the ethernet connection - I even acquired some Supra ethernet cable for the final link to the Auralic, which did make an audible improvement, but ultimately found wireless connection to be preferable - YMMV as ever...
MH
Thanks Mother Sky - that's interesting to hear and will experiment myself. Is your 'MotherSky' name inspired by the Can track per chance? :)
 

bencat

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With regard to FLAC storage I have around 63000 tracks on a 2tb SSD and there is about 256gb left . This is about 4500 Albums so quite a a decent size .
 
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MotherSky

The stone that killed two birds
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Thanks Mother Sky - that's interesting to hear and will experiment myself. Is your 'MotherSky' name inspired by the Can track per chance? :)
Yes indeed - I thought DownTheBakerlooLineWithAnne was a bit cumbersome ;)
 
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DomT

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I have an Aurlaic Altair G1 and you are right that Auralic recommend external drives. But I have to say that I have compared this to other streamers and it sounds rather good. I also have an Innuos Zen Mini with internal SSD drive that also sounds rather good. Maybe there would be a difference with an external drive but I wouldn’t worry about it unless you have a very very revealing system and are very sensitive to any digital ‘noise’.
 

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