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Good hard drive for streaming lossless??

Saffy

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Hi, Any HD brand or spec suggestions? I have a Pro-ject S2 Ultra streamer and about 700MG of ripped CDs in FLAC in an old HD.
I suppose it should be SSD?
Please help
 
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pozz

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700 megabytes? Any USB key will do in that case. You can get a 64gb one for fairly cheap.
 

pozz

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I'd buy Western Digital and avoid Seagate for HDDs.

Not sure about current SSDs. I bought a small Samsung to host my OS a long time ago, using two 1TB HDDs for data, and all of them are still running fine.
 

QMuse

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Hi, Any HD brand or spec suggestions? I have a Pro-ject S2 Ultra streamer and about 700MG of ripped CDs in FLAC in an old HD.
I suppose it should be SSD?
Please help

I'm using WD Red in my NAS, I'd say they are very good value for the money.
 

mansr

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Look at BackBlaze HDD reports for their quarterly reliability statistics.
Those figures should be taken with a pinch of salt. They use cheap consumer drives well outside their intended parameters. It's like measuring how many bricks you can throw at a car before the windows break.

If you want the best reliability, get the more "enterprise" drives. WD or Seagate shouldn't matter. If you want to save money, get a cheaper consumer model, but pay attention to the intended usage. Either way, keep backups. All drives will fail eventually.

1TB SSDs have become quite affordable, so those can be tempting. Here too, one must pay attention to the specs as they vary widely. Of course, for mostly static, read-only storage like a music collection, most of the numbers are irrelevant. The metrics that do matter, they don't tell you anyway.

Personally, I'm sticking with traditional hard drives for bulk storage. I don't like surprises.
 

Willem

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This far we had two reputable SSDs fail on us, an dno traditional ones. But it is a small sample. Personally I would opt for SSD because of their silent operation and make sure to have a backup.
 

QMuse

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I'm aware of that. I have 2 mirrored Red drives in my Synology NAS. What you should care about is this: "SMR hard drives are best used in workloads where the majority of the drive's duty cycle consists of reads rather than writes. "

With my NAS I do exactly that - I write the music files once and listen to them many times.
 

Pluto

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My point is that the much vaunted Western Digital appears to have been caught with its pants round its ankles. Their hard-won reputation as top dog of the drive world could easily get flushed down the pan over this.
 

Feargal

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It looks like CMR versions of WD Reds are still available to buy. The model number for the CMR versions seems to include "EFRX" and the SMR versions "EFAX". This page on WD's website lists the models with CMR and SMR.
 

ZolaIII

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Hi, Any HD brand or spec suggestions? I have a Pro-ject S2 Ultra streamer and about 700MG of ripped CDs in FLAC in an old HD.
I suppose it should be SSD?
Please help
Try with WD Purple or some other NAS/surveillance one's. Now days price sweat spot is on 4TB side.
 

mansr

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My point is that the much vaunted Western Digital appears to have been caught with its pants round its ankles. Their hard-won reputation as top dog of the drive world could easily get flushed down the pan over this.
Seagate are guilty of the same thing, so you don't have a choice. Besides, there's nothing actually wrong with the drives.
 

QMuse

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Seagate are guilty of the same thing, so you don't have a choice. Besides, there's nothing actually wrong with the drives.

Exactly. CMR drives are needed with intense writing and random I/O operations associated with databases etc. We don't need to buy enterprise class discs for home use as it is entirely different usage scenario which mostly includes sequential reads for which SMR is ok.
 
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