Audiophile hard drive

[justanalogue]

An audiophile harddrive is a snake oil related expression IMHO, just zero's and ones

[jamesfeline]

Yes I know .. I did not say that
the purpose was a robust hard drive for his studio .. plus for his reasons wanted a 4T byte
drive .. plus in a very polite way its not just zeros and ones otherwise DACS would be very simple and easy to design ... Jitter as one example
Anyway I just thought I would put my design on the forum .. sometimes I don't know why I bother at times
the original post that I started was from 2011 so have drifted off from the original post that I made some years ago

[Charles Darwin]

For a studio a RAID array set up with redundancy so that any one drive can fail with it losing any data.

In a studio situation it is just zeros and ones because every studio convertor re-clocks.
ALWAYS use the convertors internal clock unless it is made by Digidesign.
For some technical reason those are the only convertors which can be improved by external clocking.

[phofman]

Your design to suppress the vibrations of a rotational HDD is truly impressive, hats off. I understand it has been running for a while now. Today a 4TB SSD is quite reasonably priced and while still much more expensive than a HDD, it may be competitive compared to the HDD + the mechanical construction.

[jamesfeline]

It's a funny thing .. I had a thought
Old hard drives will become retro (snake oil rubbed in) like valves and there will be a sure argument that they sound better then SSD counterparts.. My prediction .. just like WAV vs flac file etc etc ...
I also noticed hard drives can now go upto 16T and 12T easily purchased .. the fun of audio DIY

[jamesfeline]

Plus also to mention I just wanted to use that was unused kicking around my workshop .. so feel pleased I have used the components and parts to good use rather then binning them .. also I did not mention that there are a few of these drives plugged into a stand alone raid controller .. again something I also made myself

[jamesfeline]

Originally Posted by phofman

Your design to suppress the vibrations of a rotational HDD is truly impressive, hats off. I understand it has been running for a while now. Today a 4TB SSD is quite reasonably priced and while still much more expensive than a HDD, it may be competitive compared to the HDD + the mechanical construction.

it was also heat .. as there are 6 drives all in the same rack (its a one off that I put together) that are controlled by a separate rack mount raid controller

[jamesfeline]

Little pic of my pc based HTPC setup .. works for me, the big case on the bottom left is the pc .. preamp and power amps top left
I use JRiver platform for the music etc ... and all my movies on the remote hard drives

[diyiggy]

Hi,


I don't understand the purpose of avoiding vivrations on hdd ? Is there a proof that poor vibrations in a living room due mainly to the loudspeakers are making error reads, i.e. not bit perfect streaming ? (so error between the hdd and the sound card where all is bufered from the hdd inside to the soundcards ports ?)


Feeding the pc unit or the sound card with linear low noise is a great idea. Although there are often on the mother board some smps chip that are often noisy... bits don't suffer of noise as far as there are no loss... however te adc & dacs of the sound card deserve all the effort imho...
I'm wondering if some enthusiast have feed their internal soundccards with LiPoFe cells or hacked the power supply bus for a linear low noise supply ?


This is the dac part of PC that keep me in the external device camp...


Nice project

[nigelwright7557]

I threw out my graphics card and just use motherboard one now.
I was expecting massive slow down of screen but it never happened.
So more room inside my pc and no big electric bills for 2-300 watt graphics card on all day.
And I use CAD software on it with no problems.
And develop software.