External hard drives and sound quality

Cio52

There are similar tweaks that work well too. Mostly those we apply to the audio components themselves, as you pointed out.

Outboard drives, USB or NAS in my home respond to compliant footers by decreasing both vibration and it's inherent noise. yes. With Bright Star nodes and/or some other like affair, the actual noise of the drive diminishes or dies out. In my arrangement, all drives and gear are in a separate room so their vibrating - spinning noises are mostly inconsequential, although I feel there seems to be a slight improvment in Sound Quality or I’d like to think so. If there is it’s pretty small.

Additionally, exchanging the OEM power cords for better ones add audio gains too. Use of electrical conditioning filters - conditioners, are of still more help in keeping out the junk the pc puts off into the homes electrical service... it's just like a CDP. My tower resides in a OEM filled Sound anchor rack with compliant footers beneath it's shelf. it also uses a Voodoo Black Dragon or Nirvana pc. It's fed by a PSA UPC 200.

All outboard drives are fed via a PSA Duet supplied by a Python VX from another dedicated ckt on the same phase.

Merely removing the large access panel from the tower affords better cooling and oddly enough lowers vibration too while reducing heat. Gratefully, my Dell runs so quiet I almost can’t hear it run standing right next to it.. In fact I’ve accidentally had to restart it a couple times as I couldn’t hear it wind up following pushing the Start button on the tower..

Noise in the track associated with the drive itself?
I think that might be accouhnted for by the outlet, wires touching each other or in close proximity to one another somewhere, or junk on the power line more so than the resonance from the HDD.

some disk drives are physically noisier than others (fans, etc.). You might be able to hear them if in the listening room. Adding an external drive might add noise to that from the computer itself resulting in more background noise than otherwise. That's the only thing that makes any sense to me regarding the "sound" of disk drives. This has nothing to so with the digital bits or signal source per se.

Larry...with all due respect, that is a very grandiose position. In the bigger picture, I'm fascinated with posts such as yours where people on internet forums decide...based on their knowledge base...that another poster is imagining the basis for his comments. Ones knowledge base must be quite vast to begin assuming such positions! Especially in an audiophile forum where so many things most folks do not understand have such striking impacts. On paper, your comments may be true (although I seriously doubt it) but in practice they are quite false.

The only thing I can add is that with my music server setup which has used both internal and external storage, I cannot attribute any sonic differences to the disk storage media used and I will loose no sleep over this.

Changes to any of the parts of my system that are involved in making or transmitting the analog music signal (Roku network players, DACs, amps, wires, speakers) as opposed to merely storing and sending digital data are all clearly audible to me.

I suspect clearly there must be cases with devices perhaps not functioning correctly or up to specs where sound or even basic operation must be affected, but this is an exception case and not the norm. The solution is to use devices in good working order, not necessarily to change device type in teh quest for better sound.