11 ms·

Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles

38 points by ItsTotallyOn 5y ago

johnklos 5y ago
Many years ago I knew an audiophile who got those crazy magazines and catalogues listing CD players for thousands of dollars and cables for hundreds. One CD player that stood out had all sorts of sales-speak that was obviously bullpoop. For example, it said the CD player "bathes the underside of the CD in blue laser light" to make the data laser work better. There were plenty of other silly voodoo technologies this player offered. It took a while, but I explained to my friend that bits are bits. If a bit is a one, it's a one. There's no such thing as a "fancy", audiophiles-pay-more-and-get-a-better-version of one. Same with zero. I told him the bits could be written in crayon, sent across a desert on camelback, and reassembled a year later, and those same bits would still be the same bits If there are scratches and a player has to correct and guess, that's different, but if your CDs are clean and your clock is good, and you're sending bits digitally to your D/A & amp, there's literally no difference between one player and another. None. Zero. After an hour and a dozen examples, something clicked in his head and he finally understood. It was very interesting to hear how I blew his mind, and how he'd never see all the sales speak BS the same way again. As for SSDs, I can see how plenty of cheap computers have noisy electronics which can lead to noisy audio, and how power usage fluctuations can cause noise, but if putting caps on your SSD makes that better, then there are bigger problems.
- polishdude20 5y ago
  Yeah on the digital side, it doesn't matter much. It's when you get to the analogue side where quality matters. Although this is not mentioning the fact that past a certain point of quality, human ears can't discern the difference and it becomes more of a placebo.
  - 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
    And money buys higher quality to a point, but when you get into boutique stuff you can end up fighting the fact that the volume simply isn't there to support a high-end engineering effort. That's why you can spend $2000 on a CD player and end up with something that has inferior audio quality to a launch-model PlayStation.
- runnerup 5y ago
  Sometimes the USB cable which connects my iPhone to my Honda Civic degrades. I have to replace it every 6 months or so. It doesn't kill the connection, but audio quality goes down very noticeably. Replacing it with a new one seems to fix it for the next half-year. Is this real? Whats the mechanism behind it?
  - Matthias247 5y ago
    Likely the cable gets physically damaged, which degrades the signal integrity on the cable. Basically if the cable is cut there will not be any signal anymore, but there can also be states somewhere in between. With reduced integrity the chance of data loss or corruption during transmission increases. There are typically low level integrity checks and forward error correction used to compensate for some of that on serial links, but they can only do so much. If data is detected lost its pretty much up to the upper level protocol on what to do next: One could retransmit, do nothing, or just use the corrupted data. Since retransmission would not help audio protocols they likely will use the other options, and so you get degraded sound.
  - zepolen 5y ago
    Cars are terrible environments for electronics, the temperatures in there range from freezing to sweltering and you can be sure that the tiny gauge wire in most cheap usb cables will pay the price from the constant expansion/contraction cycle day by day. This can cause resistance pockets in the wire itself especially when since it's probably continuously moved around every time you plug in the phone, further stressing the wires. Lastly condensation inside the car can corrode contacts slowly causing further signal degradation. Your best bet would be a thicker gauge wire usb cable with gold contacts.
    - tuatoru 5y ago
      Most "gold" contacts have thin gold plating (10 micrometres or thinner) which is wiped off with a few insertion/removal cycles. The gold is added by the manufacturer to prevent corrosion of the contacts during transport and storage of the cable/device prior to first use. Contacts corrode on exposure to oxidants. They can be re-made by disconnecting and reconnecting, which (if the contacts are properly designed) wipes their surfaces. I have never heard of "resistance pockets" in wire, but I suppose that could be one way of describing broken conductors inside the cable that only continue to work because the end pieces are still making contact. Until the ends corrode or the wire is flexed in a way that pulls the ends apart.
cwilkes 5y ago
No vacuum tubes? NO SALE
- bwanab 5y ago
  Tubes are probably the one thing that actually can have a real effect on the sound of an amp. The key word there is “can”.
jmpman 5y ago
I would have preferred a review that wasn’t quite as dismissive. SSDs have periodic higher read latency that could impact audio playback if the host buffers aren’t large enough. The flash translation layer periodically reshuffles data, even when the workload is just reads. I expect this drive is duplicating the data internally, and pivoting back and forth between the two copies, targeting one which is not performing garbage collection at that time. This mechanism would result in more consistent, lower latency read performance. It might even be more advanced than that - triple mirroring the data - hardening the data to two copies first, while serving the non impacted read blocks from the third copy. Although the other SSD claims do sound ridiculous, consistent read performance is a nice feature. This type of capability is expected in enterprise storage, it may have some use in consumer class storage applications, besides just audio.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  > SSDs have periodic higher read latency that could impact audio playback if the host buffers aren’t large enough. Buffering sufficient to deal with a CD reader losing tracking and needing to reacquire it, which takes an order of magnitude longer than all but the most pathological flash management scenarios, has been an utterly boring consumer-grade feature since the late 90s.
- summm 5y ago
  For pure listening, latency is totally irrelevant as long as the buffers are large enough, and that's a software thing. Heck, one complete audio CD fits uncompressed in one GB of RAM...
- wtallis 5y ago
  I think your mental model of how SSDs work is a bit inaccurate. Read operations will not trigger wear leveling during normal use. Reads will only cause the SSD to start moving data around if there's a correctable ECC error with the read, prompting the drive to write a fresh and corrected copy. Correctable read errors can crop up from data degradation over time, or from read disturb errors (analogous to DRAM rowhammer). Neither of those causes are even remotely likely unless you have a highly atypical workload that does not at all fit an audio use case. The probability of a latency spike due to these causes leading to an audible glitch is small enough that it should be entirely ignored. If you're worried about read latency on a scale that could affect an audio workload, the only change to the SSD that might be relevant would be disabling the low-power idle modes, which can take a while to wake up from. Enterprise SSDs have other measures to manage QoS targets that are tighter than what an audio use case requires, and those features are only necessary when dealing with a workload that includes a heavy volume of write operations—not relevant to audiophiles. And enterprise drives definitely don't need to duplicate all your data as a way of avoiding high read latency; it's possible to suspend write operations in order to service a read request that needs to access the same physical block.
zmix 5y ago
No measured data AND no hearing experience. Now that's what I call serious journalism!
- morsch 5y ago
  Would you expect them to take measurements or do a double blind test if I was selling invisible pink dragons to improve audio quality and they were reporting on it? If anything, I thought the article was too tame.
- wtallis 5y ago
  You seem to have overlooked that this piece is filed in the news section, not the reviews section.
  - cmsj 5y ago
    To be fair though, audiophile reviews never contain any actual measured data either.
    - zmix 5y ago
      That's not fair at all! At least not to the major audiophile magazines, here in Germany, or such a prestigious publication like "The Stereophile". Just two examples: https://www.stereophile.com/content/bowers-wilkins-diamond-series-804-d4-loudspeaker-measurements https://www.stereophile.com/content/bowers-wilkins-diamond-s... or https://www.stereo.de/hifi-test/produkt/aavik-d-180-2058 https://www.stereo.de/hifi-test/produkt/aavik-d-180-2058 (see "Messergebnisse" and "Messwerte").
  - zmix 5y ago
    I did not overlook the devaluation of the product in the title, which can only be a result: "Snake Oil". This is why I said: "No measurements AND no experience." But he came to a conclusion: It's snake-oil. Unprofessional.
    - wtallis 5y ago
ipspam 5y ago
Put this this hard drive in a normal computer, and you won't hear a difference. That would be ridiculous. It would be put in a $3000-$6,000 audiophile music server that has a custom clean purpose built OS, and an audiophile DC linear power supply. Everything is optimized for clean power and clean signal. This harddrive seeks to solve a VERY REAL problem in the audiophile world: computers are super D super noisy. There are many ways to reduce noise. The best way is to isolate the computer entirely. I use a Sonore OpticalRendu and opticalmodule deluxe. Duel Femto clocks on each side to eliminate jitter, and fiberoptic cable in between to physically isolate the electronics from one another. The computer sends the file wirelessly to the router, where it then gets turned into a light signal to keep all the nasty electrical noise and timing errors out of the signal. (and yes, every single piece of equipment connects to the wall from a single socket, with a distributor, and then 2 power conditioners for different equipment, similar to isolation, I've at least made a solid solid effort) This is $2300 for a piece of equipment that isn't needed if I just plug my computer into my DAC. It works miracles. Night and day. So yes, some things may seem and look frivolous, and many are. Most are also extremely expensive. It's like racing. That last 1% performance is ultra expensive, but makes all the difference. Anyone here driving a race car will never notice all the attention to detail that allows one racecars to beat another.

38 points by ItsTotallyOn 5y ago

Many years ago I knew an audiophile who got those crazy magazines and catalogues listing CD players for thousands of dollars and cables for hundreds. One CD player that stood out had all sorts of sales-speak that was obviously bullpoop. For example, it said the CD player "bathes the underside of the CD in blue laser light" to make the data laser work better. There were plenty of other silly voodoo technologies this player offered. It took a while, but I explained to my friend that bits are bits. If a bit is a one, it's a one. There's no such thing as a "fancy", audiophiles-pay-more-and-get-a-better-version of one. Same with zero. I told him the bits could be written in crayon, sent across a desert on camelback, and reassembled a year later, and those same bits would still be the same bits If there are scratches and a player has to correct and guess, that's different, but if your CDs are clean and your clock is good, and you're sending bits digitally to your D/A & amp, there's literally no difference between one player and another. None. Zero. After an hour and a dozen examples, something clicked in his head and he finally understood. It was very interesting to hear how I blew his mind, and how he'd never see all the sales speak BS the same way again. As for SSDs, I can see how plenty of cheap computers have noisy electronics which can lead to noisy audio, and how power usage fluctuations can cause noise, but if putting caps on your SSD makes that better, then there are bigger problems.

polishdude20 5y ago
Yeah on the digital side, it doesn't matter much. It's when you get to the analogue side where quality matters. Although this is not mentioning the fact that past a certain point of quality, human ears can't discern the difference and it becomes more of a placebo.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  And money buys higher quality to a point, but when you get into boutique stuff you can end up fighting the fact that the volume simply isn't there to support a high-end engineering effort. That's why you can spend $2000 on a CD player and end up with something that has inferior audio quality to a launch-model PlayStation.
runnerup 5y ago
Sometimes the USB cable which connects my iPhone to my Honda Civic degrades. I have to replace it every 6 months or so. It doesn't kill the connection, but audio quality goes down very noticeably. Replacing it with a new one seems to fix it for the next half-year. Is this real? Whats the mechanism behind it?
- Matthias247 5y ago
  Likely the cable gets physically damaged, which degrades the signal integrity on the cable. Basically if the cable is cut there will not be any signal anymore, but there can also be states somewhere in between. With reduced integrity the chance of data loss or corruption during transmission increases. There are typically low level integrity checks and forward error correction used to compensate for some of that on serial links, but they can only do so much. If data is detected lost its pretty much up to the upper level protocol on what to do next: One could retransmit, do nothing, or just use the corrupted data. Since retransmission would not help audio protocols they likely will use the other options, and so you get degraded sound.
- zepolen 5y ago
  Cars are terrible environments for electronics, the temperatures in there range from freezing to sweltering and you can be sure that the tiny gauge wire in most cheap usb cables will pay the price from the constant expansion/contraction cycle day by day. This can cause resistance pockets in the wire itself especially when since it's probably continuously moved around every time you plug in the phone, further stressing the wires. Lastly condensation inside the car can corrode contacts slowly causing further signal degradation. Your best bet would be a thicker gauge wire usb cable with gold contacts.
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    Most "gold" contacts have thin gold plating (10 micrometres or thinner) which is wiped off with a few insertion/removal cycles. The gold is added by the manufacturer to prevent corrosion of the contacts during transport and storage of the cable/device prior to first use. Contacts corrode on exposure to oxidants. They can be re-made by disconnecting and reconnecting, which (if the contacts are properly designed) wipes their surfaces. I have never heard of "resistance pockets" in wire, but I suppose that could be one way of describing broken conductors inside the cable that only continue to work because the end pieces are still making contact. Until the ends corrode or the wire is flexed in a way that pulls the ends apart.

cwilkes 5y ago

No vacuum tubes? NO SALE

bwanab 5y ago
Tubes are probably the one thing that actually can have a real effect on the sound of an amp. The key word there is “can”.

jmpman 5y ago

I would have preferred a review that wasn’t quite as dismissive. SSDs have periodic higher read latency that could impact audio playback if the host buffers aren’t large enough. The flash translation layer periodically reshuffles data, even when the workload is just reads. I expect this drive is duplicating the data internally, and pivoting back and forth between the two copies, targeting one which is not performing garbage collection at that time. This mechanism would result in more consistent, lower latency read performance. It might even be more advanced than that - triple mirroring the data - hardening the data to two copies first, while serving the non impacted read blocks from the third copy. Although the other SSD claims do sound ridiculous, consistent read performance is a nice feature. This type of capability is expected in enterprise storage, it may have some use in consumer class storage applications, besides just audio.

0xcde4c3db 5y ago
> SSDs have periodic higher read latency that could impact audio playback if the host buffers aren’t large enough. Buffering sufficient to deal with a CD reader losing tracking and needing to reacquire it, which takes an order of magnitude longer than all but the most pathological flash management scenarios, has been an utterly boring consumer-grade feature since the late 90s.
summm 5y ago
For pure listening, latency is totally irrelevant as long as the buffers are large enough, and that's a software thing. Heck, one complete audio CD fits uncompressed in one GB of RAM...
wtallis 5y ago
I think your mental model of how SSDs work is a bit inaccurate. Read operations will not trigger wear leveling during normal use. Reads will only cause the SSD to start moving data around if there's a correctable ECC error with the read, prompting the drive to write a fresh and corrected copy. Correctable read errors can crop up from data degradation over time, or from read disturb errors (analogous to DRAM rowhammer). Neither of those causes are even remotely likely unless you have a highly atypical workload that does not at all fit an audio use case. The probability of a latency spike due to these causes leading to an audible glitch is small enough that it should be entirely ignored. If you're worried about read latency on a scale that could affect an audio workload, the only change to the SSD that might be relevant would be disabling the low-power idle modes, which can take a while to wake up from. Enterprise SSDs have other measures to manage QoS targets that are tighter than what an audio use case requires, and those features are only necessary when dealing with a workload that includes a heavy volume of write operations—not relevant to audiophiles. And enterprise drives definitely don't need to duplicate all your data as a way of avoiding high read latency; it's possible to suspend write operations in order to service a read request that needs to access the same physical block.

zmix 5y ago

No measured data AND no hearing experience. Now that's what I call serious journalism!

morsch 5y ago
Would you expect them to take measurements or do a double blind test if I was selling invisible pink dragons to improve audio quality and they were reporting on it? If anything, I thought the article was too tame.
wtallis 5y ago
You seem to have overlooked that this piece is filed in the news section, not the reviews section.
- cmsj 5y ago
  To be fair though, audiophile reviews never contain any actual measured data either.
  - zmix 5y ago
    That's not fair at all! At least not to the major audiophile magazines, here in Germany, or such a prestigious publication like "The Stereophile". Just two examples: https://www.stereophile.com/content/bowers-wilkins-diamond-series-804-d4-loudspeaker-measurements https://www.stereophile.com/content/bowers-wilkins-diamond-s... or https://www.stereo.de/hifi-test/produkt/aavik-d-180-2058 https://www.stereo.de/hifi-test/produkt/aavik-d-180-2058 (see "Messergebnisse" and "Messwerte").
- zmix 5y ago
  I did not overlook the devaluation of the product in the title, which can only be a result: "Snake Oil". This is why I said: "No measurements AND no experience." But he came to a conclusion: It's snake-oil. Unprofessional.
  - wtallis 5y ago

ipspam 5y ago

Put this this hard drive in a normal computer, and you won't hear a difference. That would be ridiculous. It would be put in a $3000-$6,000 audiophile music server that has a custom clean purpose built OS, and an audiophile DC linear power supply. Everything is optimized for clean power and clean signal. This harddrive seeks to solve a VERY REAL problem in the audiophile world: computers are super D super noisy. There are many ways to reduce noise. The best way is to isolate the computer entirely. I use a Sonore OpticalRendu and opticalmodule deluxe. Duel Femto clocks on each side to eliminate jitter, and fiberoptic cable in between to physically isolate the electronics from one another. The computer sends the file wirelessly to the router, where it then gets turned into a light signal to keep all the nasty electrical noise and timing errors out of the signal. (and yes, every single piece of equipment connects to the wall from a single socket, with a distributor, and then 2 power conditioners for different equipment, similar to isolation, I've at least made a solid solid effort) This is $2300 for a piece of equipment that isn't needed if I just plug my computer into my DAC. It works miracles. Night and day. So yes, some things may seem and look frivolous, and many are. Most are also extremely expensive. It's like racing. That last 1% performance is ultra expensive, but makes all the difference. Anyone here driving a race car will never notice all the attention to detail that allows one racecars to beat another.