An external SSD for music storage

Recently ripped 160 CDs as uncompressed WAV files which took up about 97 GB on my media server.
Your collection should fit on a 500 GB drive if you digitize the LPs at CD quality of 16 bit, 44.1 kHz.
SSD storage is cheap now at about $100/TB and will only get cheaper, so there's no real need to use compression. Samsung SSDs are both good quality and good value. Good luck.
 
As it is USB memory only that changes things quite a bit. The chosen SSD storage device now needs SPDIF somewhere along the line, be it wired or optical. A USB drive will also do but it will not allow for much in the way of control. A Pi with a SPDIF HAT would be one possibility or a NAS with a SPDIF output.
 
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Just adding to the good points already made in this forum thread:

- regarding redundancy/backup, I have a rather simple approach which is to always have 2 separate hard drives which both contain my digital music collection. The main hard one is a 3 TB conventional hard drive is attached to my desktop computer, and obviously that's where I do all acquisition - ripping, downloading, etc. The second is a 1TB SSD hard drive installed in a Synology NAS, and that's what my music server accesses for playback.
At the first sign that either one of these drives is failing, I will immediately replace it, copying over all data from the still-functioning hard drive.

- regarding WAV versus FLAC, I advise everyone to go FLAC - regardless of compression considerations - because of reliable tagging! FLAC uses vorbis comment for tag metadata, which is a known, reliable standard, easily read by any/all audio playback applications. WAV, on the other hand, has no formalised tagging standard, only a de facto standard for ID3 tags in the RIFF chunk. What this means is that reading these tags can be a hit-and-miss affair. Sure, your present audio playback system may be able to read the tags, but this might not hold true when you move to a different system in the future. Also, different audio editing applications handle RIFF chunks differently, so you may find that if you open one of your wav files in Sound Forge, for example, then re-save the WAV (for whatever reason) the tag then becomes scrambled or completely blank when read by your audio playback system!
If you really really don't like the idea of lossless compression, then buy a copy of dBpoweramp, which allows completely uncompressed FLAC encodings -
 

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jean-paul - I think that means buying a new PC.

You mean an internal SSD? I have yet to see the first pc device that has no spare slot for an SSD. Although I detest pc's for music playback and consider it the poorest of choices I have fitted a few Dell pc's with an "audio SSD". Works OK but not my cup of tea as the screen and the noise disturb big time MHO. External devices often have mediocre PSU's, may suffer from theft/loss, defective connectors/cables, cable clutter etc. and copying to USB media appears the easy way out but it isn't. In practice it is not wanting to adapt to network copying to the elder and thus not gaining knowledge. That is standing still.

Suggestion: make sure you have a simple NAS like WD EX2 Ultra with at least 2 drives in RAID 1 and a spare drive when one goes defective. Copy files in FLAC of course. Move optical devices to storage or one will never get the hang of it. A good quality dedicated media player with local storage like an SSD is silent and fit for the job. The NAS is the data tank only for replenishing the local storage of the media player. This is the minimum scenario to limit risk of loss of data I think. Before someone says it... the NAS is officially no back up.
 
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Backing up is critical. Consider at any time one or two of the hard drives you own could fail. They do. It is inevitable, it's just a waiting game. I've had drives last five years and I've had drives that have lasted less than 100 hours of use. I back up.....a lot! An offsite backup is imperative. I always have two onsite backups as well. If my house burnt down I'd lose the last month or two. I have a close relative who kept ignoring my backup advice who lost over ten years of precious photographs including several overseas holidays. He deleted his backup drive to copy some movies, then his main data drive failed.
 
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Although experienced I shouldn't so stuff when I have the flue. I deleted my main and backup drive last week almost at the same time when I was feverish. In my defense: I was swapping a NAS for a new one and thought I was formatting the right disks (ahem) en then formatted the right ones (ahem). Could retrieve all data from backup but it happens...to all of us. One day or the other.
 
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I like to come back to the choice for spending lots of time and effort to convert/multiple backups on your music collection.

I got thinking about the wisdom of that when I spend some time with SY just before the COVID period. We would spend hours playing music, taking turns like 'do you know this one?' or 'remember this?' type discussions.

The source of it all? SY's Amazon Music subscription.
I can tell you, you may have 5000 songs in your collection, but being able to tap 5 million by just typing a name or a term into a search area is like magic!
I still have my collection, but I think it is more out of nostalgia and the stories behind them, than out of security. When I read here about the heroic efforts people go through to safeguard something that is available anywhere anytime for basically free anyway, what's the point?
I don't know how much longer I will drag those drives along.

Jan
 
I like to come back to the choice for spending lots of time and effort to convert/multiple backups on your music collection.

Music makes up around 10% of the data I have. Photos make up more than half. In total about 60% of the 8TB drive in my server.

The music adds no extra effort in my data management so it comes along for the ride.
 
I don't know how much longer I will drag those drives along.
For the average Joe, yes, I think streaming will overtake the old fashioned model of buying and storing music.
But music ownership retains some benefits for we hifi people - the ability to choose different versions of albums. The music industry didn't completely shift to digital recording/mastering until well into the 1990's, and the analogue-to-digital masters which were created for CD release up until that point were sometimes of dubious technical quality. To get new material out as quickly as possible, record companies often chose to supply 2nd or 3rd generation analogue sub-masters to different CD pressing plants around the world, who struck their own digital transfers. So to obtain the best sounding version of many classic albums recorded pre-1990, we sometimes need to pick-and-choose. Then there are re-masters, which are sometimes but not always better than the original masters.
In my own music collection, I can say that the 1982 Japan 35DP-20 master of Boz Scaggs Silk Degrees is a revelation over the more common CD releases of this album. It's a similar tale for the 1990 SP34b Nirvana Bleach, and other albums by Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Prince, Steely Dan, Pink Floyd etc etc.
 
I’ve been streaming Tidal since ‘18 and have only lost a few songs off my playlist to the selling of song rights by record labels etc. they can usually be found again under the new label.
Tidal also allows you to download whatever you have on your playlist(singles or full albums), it will stay viable as long as you have a subscription, I pay $20/month for the ‘hi-fi’ version and to be honest find it the deal of my lifetime.
There’s nothing stopping you from keeping your collection of rare/exceptional recordings, in fact streaming just opens the door to finding new music you otherwise never would have found and may want to purchase.
It’s not a replacement just a option. :cool:
 
Music makes up around 10% of the data I have. Photos make up more than half. In total about 60% of the 8TB drive in my server. The music adds no extra effort in my data management so it comes along for the ride.

I have about the same mix and I just upgraded to 3 separate 10 TB drives since the 6 TB's got full.

Many years ago (late 80's) CD's themselves would die in a year or two if left in a black car in Florida. After losing a few I got a setup in a PC to keep music.

Anyone here remember the Pro Audio Spectrum 16 with a SCSI CD burner? All new CD's got stored in the PC. "Throw - aways" and "mix - tapes" on CD were made for the car. I also put a phono stage in front of the PAS16 and ripped some obscure classic vinyl that never made it to CD.

Pictures? Anyone remember the old Sony camera that used a floppy disk for "film"? Let's just say that it didn't displace my film and darkroom, that came later.

At last count I have about 500,000 pictures on my PC, many are time lapses where you let the camera take 1 picture per second for say an hour. I learned NOT to let the memory card be the limiting factor. Weird things happen when the camera tries to overstuff the chip. My poor Panasonic FZ-1000 has almost 300,000 pictures on it, and it keeps on taking, despite being wet a few times.

Memory cards get corrupted, CD's die. Records get scratched.....make copies, and make copies of the copies and keep them in different places.

You can get 1 and 2 TB SSD's in the little M.2 format. You can get a little metal housing that holds one and connects to nearly anything via USB. They come in SATA and PCIe, with old style USB and Faster USB ports. I use one of the PCIe versions with a 1 TB WD blue drive in it for my current "play list" of video and music. It works in anything from my music and video only PC to a smart TV set. I can even use it to transfer music to my older Motorola G7 phone that has a USB jack on the bottom....no luck on an iPhone though.

The WD blue is fast enough to stream 4K video to a PC or TV set, but a faster drive may let you transfer large chunks of data faster.

Any pictures I take get immediately transferred to a PC and the USB drive since a corrupted memory card really ruined my day a few years back. Those three 10 TB drives are in three different PC's in 2 different places to guarantee at least one working copy of everything.
 

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Can't say I've ever had problems with those connectors, but they can be a complete pain none the less. I sometimes wonder if anyone ever actually user tests these things before they go to manufacturing. In the last decade I've sworn more at USB plugs than I have at any other thing.

Trouble is, many external drives need them, and the housings for mounting internal drives for external use also have them.
 
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SSD should not be filled up above 90% of its total capacity, that will shorten its lifespan, best is not to go above 60%.

My understanding of this is...

In the past there was an issue with cells within the storage becoming non functional because they can only be written to a certain number of times before they fail. So, for example, it was advised to never defragment an SSD. Disc controllers went to great lengths to spread data writes across the whole drive (wear levelling) to minimise particular cells being written excessively.

A very busy drive (lots of writes and deletes) would, very gradually see the drive's capacity diminish over time as cells failed to be written. More of an issue in commercial settings than domestic but even so...

Controllers, algorithms and the storage itself have improved a lot so 'wear' is much less of a problem. Also, the use case being discussed is, largely, write once, read many, so issues with wear are unlikely to arise.
 
I see lots of info since I last posted some of which seems to be by those who didn't read my OP.
jan.didden - as per my first post - I have over 1000 + LPs and an increasing number, 100 + CDs - I have no need of Amazon or any other download sites. Yesterday I reached 76 and I'm still alive, a complete surprise, never thought I would make it past 35, run-ins with Fascism in 68 and mafias afterwards etc. I've lived through musical revolutions from the 60s onwards. I would put the 60s' and 70s' on a par with the musical revolution of the Enlightenment - it's been rehash and b/s since then with very few exceptions, this is of course my personal opinion.

jean-paul - I don't trust Big Brother - he wears Brown/Black/Red/Blue and technicolour shirts but it's still Big brother, put all my music in the Cloud - no thank you. So many havn't got a clue what Big Bro will do if the peasants cause any real problem for him - surround the power stations with his mercenary armies (all the world's armies are now mercenary and obey orders) and then turn off the juice - goodbye modern world. I can't wait to see the mass breakdowns when their mobile phones no longer work. Which is why as a priority I will fit a quality diesel generator ( safest and longest shelf life) rather than petrol or gas, one accident and that's it - goodnight Vienna, a pure sine wave inverter with AVR and cheap golf cart batteries until the graphene batteries arrive. This guarantees me a continuation of the modern world.

jean-paul - quite agree about noise but I have an Azulle BYTE 3 which is silent and yes it has a built in SATA cable to take an internal 2.5 SSD.

techtool - thank you - you are the only one to mention a minimum capacity. I shall probably go for 1T.

linuxfan - see the O/post I now update that to having 4 x for storing my collection.

mountainman - via my 3-in-1 subscription with Bouyges here in France I have access to 7 music channels, 5 of which are IMO crap but then there is Intermezzo and Stingray Brava where I can have the best seat in the world's best concert halls and the same as those lucky buggers in Berlin who have that wonderful open air ampi- theatre. All the best Jazz festivals across the world and opera, again from the best opera houses, classical and modern ballet and dance - I don't need Tidal or Spotisfy and along with 24/7 as long as I like landline to landline to 90 countries worldwide and loads of TV stations worldwide and all for €39.99 per month - what's not to like.

I repeat again I will use a mini PC just for music storage and playback - there will be no other use at all. Some idiot in the UK developed a very good product and kept all the info on a PC connected to the net - the Chinese hacked it and stole everything. Correct me if I'm wrong but malware/corruption and bugs can only occur if the PC used is connected to the net. So no rewriting, no connection should mean 5 years before needing transfer to new storage yes/