External hard drives and sound quality

You ask a question that only you can answer. The only way you can tell is to try it and see if you hear a difference. These types of questions always get 2 types of responses which has already occurred.

1. bits are bits, how could it possibly matter?

2. Everything matters. I tried it and heard a difference.

Go to the audioasylum.com PC audio forum and you can find a lot of discussion about this. People propose that solid state drives sound better, lower rpm drives sound better, if you have a usb dac then a firewire drive sounds better and vice versa, different usb ports sound different, etc.

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Take a look at Western Digital's heavy duty drives enterprise class.

Two different computer configurations can and may well sound different but guaranteed it is other factors in either the ripping process to disk or the D to A conversion process at play and not the location of the hard drive. I'll stand by that assertion!

Thanks folks - some very helpful comments all around. Sounds like the consensus is that even a wireless external drive shouldn't compromise sound quality provided the network is fast enough. I've seen a couple of comments to the contrary elsewhere, but I think I will go ahead and give it a try - for my Macbook, probably an Aiport Extreme coupled with a Western Digital of some kind. Will let you know how it goes, and thanks a bunch!

The biggest issue I see with networked storage is with backup times.

I have almost 300Gb of music on my USB drive currently. It takes several hours to back all this up initially to a second attached USB drive. It would take many times longer than that to a network drive using wireless G.

Key is having a backup program that only backs up new files and not everything everytime.