External hard drives and sound quality

SSD's, that support trim and garbage collection, are pretty much plug and play with Windows 7. I've installed SSD's in all my laptops and desk tops. Music is stilled stored on conventional HD's (all 2.5"). With the older SSD's, and older OS's, it was a bit of a PITA setting up offsets, OS specific block lengths, and doing manual trim and garbage collection.

FYI - I just picked up an Airport Extreme and a Glyph GT050Q 1T drive, if that means anything to anybody out there... Will report back on the sound when I get everything hooked up, and thanks again!

I should add that an audio/video specialist at the store where I bought the stuff said he had never heard of somebody streaming music from an external hard drive to a Macbook wirelessly! Am I pioneering with this or what?

Blindjim -

Your internal drive could be maxed out, or heavily fragmented. There is so many other possibilities - for instance Itunes could be updated or options changed exactly at the time of switch to new drive.

Fat32 is garbage. Using non-journaled format is asking for a disaster.

If bits would "decay" then checksum errors would be reported all the time with hundreds of thousand of files on computer, compressed files (including jpegs) would be corrupted etc.

The fact that you need partitioning software to split drive or "redo" OS every year tells me that you have PC and Windows (I'm sorry).

Firewire does not load main processor (has own processing unit) the way USB does. It is also more elegant, in my opinion, with daisy chaining instead of hub (only one cable coming out of computer).

Richard_stacy - I'm not sure why you bother with NAS, unless you have network of people using it. It does nothing other than making hard disk slower. Why not just plug external drive into computer. External drives are also cheaper than NAS drives.

Kijanki...it was a tough choice deciding on the nas. connecting a usb hd to my computer would be cumbersome. the player is on my laptop which floats around my house and would not care much for anything connected. i do not even really like the n+dualband dongle i use hanging off but, unlike the post above, g band does not handle the streams/transfers as well. i do not find the nas slow in comparison to any other configuration either. this nas was not much more expensive than an external drive, $165 for the small, fanless and simple box at best buy. so at 1tb, maybe $60 more give or take. i do find that a good router is really important for smooth, fast performance.

i went through a bunch of trials before choosing this and still do question it. i tried the readynas duo which runs the player on the nas. i tried a external hd connected via usb to my router. finally i just flipped a coin (actually i asked my wife which one she thought was prettiest) and picked the blackarmor nas 110.