[fuzzyash]

smallest music collection here?
i got just under 5 gigs of mp3/alac/flac...

 

[Xenophon]

I'm not a big fan of SSD, frankly.  I know the advantages they're supposed to have over conventional disks but I had the singular bad luck of experiencing 2 SSD failures on a Macbook that I upgraded to use with SSD (2 years back, purchased a new one since).  To be honest, I think it must have been some hardware incompatibility although Apple never offered an explanation for it.  It was extremely fast...while it lasted.  But if/when they fail, they fail without warning and catastrophically.  I learned the hard way to always have a bootable conventional harddisk with me at the time.  Became a royal pain very quickly (nothing worse than a system that you know is not totally reliable).  Back to conventional disks and this drobo 'beyond raid' storage now.

 

[Byronb]

I honestly couldn't tell you. It could be jitter? If you look on the Jplay forums you'll find people going to much further lengths than I would ever dream of. USB cards, cables, special SSDs, dual computer setups. Even many who insist that SSDs are no good either who use some other kind of flash storage with a converter. And the tweaks they do software wise are immense. I won't lie, if I cut down a lot of background services there is a tiny difference, but I'm not willing to brick my computer for everything but audio use as many of them have.

No media player has direct hardware access. All hardware calls are still handled by the OS. 

 

[hifimanrookie]

No media player has direct hardware access. All hardware calls are still handled by the OS. 

I understand that jplay in combination with windows server 2012 rc2 in core operation does help..as it uses DOS screens all over again its hell to set it up though, i understand

 

[Byronb]

I understand that jplay in combination with windows server 2012 rc2 in core operation does help..as it uses DOS screens again

Actually those DOS screens are just shells running inside the 2012 kernel. It still doesn't give any media applications direct hardware level access. You still have drivers to be concerned with. Core installs just lower the attack surface of the OS by disabling the gui, it is more complicated than that obviously, but those complications are not germane to the conversation. Come to think of it, this whole thing is way off topic!  

 

[brhfl]

  I'm not a big fan of SSD, frankly.  I know the advantages they're supposed to have over conventional disks but I had the singular bad luck of experiencing 2 SSD failures on a Macbook that I upgraded to use with SSD (2 years back, purchased a new one since).  To be honest, I think it must have been some hardware incompatibility although Apple never offered an explanation for it.  It was extremely fast...while it lasted.  But if/when they fail, they fail without warning and catastrophically.  I learned the hard way to always have a bootable conventional harddisk with me at the time.  Became a royal pain very quickly (nothing worse than a system that you know is not totally reliable).  Back to conventional disks and this drobo 'beyond raid' storage now.

There have been some compatibility issues, as well as needing third party utilities to enable TRIM support (without this, wear will happen more quickly)... And when SSDs fail, they fail pretty good, that's for sure. But assuming you don't face compatibility issues, they should be much more reliable - HDDs are just failures waiting to happen, I've always hated the things. Anyway, sorry to hear about your experience... no matter what the tech, main takeaway from all of this is to always have a backup.

 

[zorin]

I use ZERO bytes for music storage. I use vintage discmans and CDs to play music. Now how will you and your survey account for people like me ?

 

[hifimanrookie]

I use ZERO bytes for music storage. I use vintage discmans and CDs to play music. Now how will you and your survey account for people like me ?

U could count the amount of cd's x 720mb?

 

[devhen]

Wow, I'm surprised > 1TB is the most common answer.
 
I have roughly 500GB of music and videos (MP3's, FLAC's, DVD rips, etc). I store them on a 2x4TB NAS device (ReadyNAS Duo v2) which gets backed up to a separate external 4TB drive.
 
I highly recommend using a NAS. They are crazy useful for lots of different applications and the automated redundancy is great to have.

 

[devhen]

 
There have been some compatibility issues, as well as needing third party utilities to enable TRIM support (without this, wear will happen more quickly)... And when SSDs fail, they fail pretty good, that's for sure. But assuming you don't face compatibility issues, they should be much more reliable - HDDs are just failures waiting to happen, I've always hated the things. Anyway, sorry to hear about your experience... no matter what the tech, main takeaway from all of this is to always have a backup.

 
HDD's are extremely reliable when used redundantly. A single hard drive is likely to fail at some point but 2 or more HDD's in a NAS device is a very reliable method of storage because the chances of 2 or more hard drives failing at the same time is almost zero. As I mentioned in my post above, I use a redundant NAS device and then backup its contents to a separate external drive as well, in case the NAS itself fails. The only way to get better redundancy than that is to also backup the data remotely (off-site) but that can be pretty costly when you're dealing with large amounts of data.

 

[julian67]

....the chances of 2 or more hard drives failing at the same time is almost zero....

Not if they are identical drives with identical usage, such as drives from the same manufacturing batch used in a mirrored RAID (same controller, same loads, same temperatures, same lifespan). You then have extremely unwelcome and enhanced odds of them failing very closely together. That's one of the reasons why mirrored RAID is no substitute for back up.

 

[devhen]

Not if they are identical drives with identical usage, such as drives from the same manufacturing batch used in a mirrored RAID (same controller, same loads, same temperatures, same lifespan). You then have extremely unwelcome and enhanced odds of them failing very closely together. That's one of the reasons why mirrored RAID is no substitute for back up.

 
You're right, there's no substitute for having multiple backups but HDD's do not fail on a uniform schedule even if they are the exact same model running on the same hardware at the same temperature. The chances are ridiculously slim that both drives will die at the same time such that you don't have time to replace the bad hard drive before the 2nd one fails. And of course there's also the added benefit that redundancy is done automatically so there's no need to setup a backup routine, the data is mirrored automatically when it is written.

That said, you're right, there is no substitute for having multiple backups.

 

[Grant99]

When I first read the subject line for "storage"...I thought well maybe he means relating to physical storage of music.  So when the options came up I really needed a ZERO option because I DON'T do computer audio at all...hell, I rarely even listen to CDs...my music is solely analogue based (tape & LP).
 
No, I'm not being sarcastic...just letting you guys know...

 

[brhfl]

 

   
HDD's are extremely reliable when used redundantly. A single hard drive is likely to fail at some point but 2 or more HDD's in a NAS device is a very reliable method of storage because the chances of 2 or more hard drives failing at the same time is almost zero. As I mentioned in my post above, I use a redundant NAS device and then backup its contents to a separate external drive as well, in case the NAS itself fails. The only way to get better redundancy than that is to also backup the data remotely (off-site) but that can be pretty costly when you're dealing with large amounts of data.

Sure, they're reliable. They'll reliably fail in about three years. I've always kept my data HDDs in arrays, and regularly swap them out, turning the old into off-site backups. I still do this with my work, as it's otherwise irreplaceable and too large to economically put on SSD, but my system drive and my music are both SSDs. Humorously, the biggest batch of premature HDD failures I've had were actually not mechanical failures, but traces on the controller boards corroding. Lost three around the same time for that (different manufacture batches), and two others looked bad but hadn't failed yet — a little anecdote which shows that obviously any and all electronics have points of failure…
 

Not if they are identical drives with identical usage, such as drives from the same manufacturing batch used in a mirrored RAID (same controller, same loads, same temperatures, same lifespan). You then have extremely unwelcome and enhanced odds of them failing very closely together. That's one of the reasons why mirrored RAID is no substitute for back up.

That's also why you avoid purchasing drives for arrays from the same source at the same time, or requesting varying batches, if at all possible

 

[Makiah S]

I know i"m up to a 1TB by now, I don't delete anything, outside of uncessicary or accidental Dups,