Which external SSD for music streaming?


My new music streamer has a USB socket to connect an external Solid State Drive. I am thinking of getting one with 2 or 4 TB storage capacity to store my whole CD collection on it. What I don't know is how fast such an SSD needs to be. I was thinking of a Crucial X6 (up to 800 MB/s), or X9 (up to 1050MB/s). Or is any SSD fast enough to stream music smoothly? Thanks

 

128x128stievus

Except for noise and reliability is there any further advantage of using an external ssd instead of hdd for streaming music?

Access speed. HDD is slower. You can easily start with HDD then get SSD later, copy everything over to it and set the HDD aside as a backup. 

One afterthought, will the difference in access speed be noticeable? Or is this just a measurement thing?

 

stievus OP

50 posts

 

One afterthought, will the difference in access speed be noticeable? Or is this just a measurement thing?

 

@stievus anecdotally, maybe. Your question is akin to asking if an OS (e.g. Windows) on a given desktop/laptop runs better if the boot drive is SSD vs. HDD. That answer would almost invariably be, yes.

I could go on a diatribe about how certain ARM-based system OS’s (via both DIY and proprietary manufactured kit), for me, ran without the software glitches and/or hardware freezes I experienced when using an external 2.5” HDD, after I switched to SSD’s. IOW (anecdotally and unverified), SSD format seemed to fix a problem that might have been rooted in external HDD storage. 

Insofar as what’s been properly tested among boards/processors and OS’s/memory use for audio streamers/transports, there’s no readily available info for influence of drive format.

It was only recently that SSD’s were demonstrated to exceed HDD’s in power consumption, but due to certain uncontrolled variables in that study, the results should be pretty suspect.