My deep dive into media storage interfaces: Musical differences heard between chipsets, Firewire 400/800, USB, SATA, flash drives, SD cards, and network shares (Warning: may cause seizures in the DBT crowd and flat earth naysayers)

[acg]

I see that Alex, this is relatively normal ramdisk behaviour with windows explorer, but it still does not change the fact that when the computer is turned off the ramdisk evaporates and has to be re-initialised, re-formatted and re-populated with files when the computer is turned on again. The only way that I can think to semi-permanently circumvent this is to power the ram by battery so that it does not lose power and wipe itself clean...but that is certainly not very practical.

 

Perhaps the computer could fire up normally, create the ramdisk for the o/s, use acronis or something similar to clone a bootable o/s to the RAMdisk, trigger a restart (which does not power down the ram??), boot from the ramdisk (not even sure that is possible) and hey presto we have an o/s running directly from ram. That is a cumbersome work-around even if it was able to work.

 

Or am I missing something Alex? It is not unusual for me to miss what is right in front of me...

 

Anthony

[sandyk]

Perhaps I am misinterpreting this section at the bottom of page 1.

Regards

Alex

 

Remember that doing so can add a significant amount of time to your PC's startup and shutdown; if you don't plan on using your RAM disk often or for critical saves, consider leaving those options unchecked. The RAM disk will be wiped every time your PC powers down, but if you're storing only temporary files on it, that's hardly a major loss.

 

Alternatively, if you want to store apps on the RAM disk but keep their output—such as documents or game saves—on a traditional drive, you can save time by loading the disk image at startup but disabling the 'Save at shutdown' option. Just manually save the disk image whenever you add or update an app.

 

After selecting your save/load options, you're good to go. Click Start RAMDisk and install the Dataram driver when prompted. The program will warn you that the image file load failed; don't sweat it. Now you need to format the disk.

 

Next Page: Formatting the RAM Disk

[acg]

Ok...I see what you mean. This is a grey area to me, because the idea is to boot the o/s from the ramdisk and not the ssd/hdd so the ssd/hdd can be taken out of the equation and even powered down if necessary. The question becomes how much of the o/s needs to be loaded before we can copy files from the ssd/hdd to a ramdisk...I would postulate that the o/s would need to be loaded before these operations are possible and therefore the o/s loaded from the ssd/hdd...but I would not really know without giving it a go. However, restarting the computer after the o/s is loaded onto the ramdisk may be possible if the BIOS is able to recognise the ramdisk at POST for the restart.

 

Sounds like a fair bit of experimentation!! I don't have any time to do it for a while, but someone else feel free to experiment.

 

Anthony

[mayhem13]

It's important to remember the basics here although the word 'disk' is used, we're still talking about a virtual drive. Although it was posted earlier that RAM is slower than SSD, that is not the case at all with RAM being exponentially faster feeding data to applications. Not sure is see any advantage to loading a RAMdisk with software or applications though as the operations are still done by the CPU, by nature a very noisey place.

 

I know this reply appears 'elementary'......but felt it neccessary for those reading outside of the discussion who might feel that the RAMdisk is a holy grail of some sorts ( please excuse the religious parallel. Lol...I couldn't help myself).

 

I have some free time for an extended lunch today so enough time to pickup the RAM sticks tonight and do some AB listening. If nothing else, my son will enjoy the reduced lag while he's killing Zombies or Aliens.

[Jud]

It's important to remember the basics here although the word 'disk' is used, we're still talking about a virtual drive. Although it was posted earlier that RAM is slower than SSD, that is not the case at all with RAM being exponentially faster feeding data to applications. Not sure is see any advantage to loading a RAMdisk with software or applications though as the operations are still done by the CPU, by nature a very noisey place.

 

I know this reply appears 'elementary'......but felt it neccessary for those reading outside of the discussion who might feel that the RAMdisk is a holy grail of some sorts ( please excuse the religious parallel. Lol...I couldn't help myself).

 

I have some free time for an extended lunch today so enough time to pickup the RAM sticks tonight and do some AB listening. If nothing else, my son will enjoy the reduced lag while he's killing Zombies or Aliens.

 

Yeah, I think the part about speed of moving the data sounds familiar to me from my recollection of what PeterSt said (don't recall if Damien said anything specific, other than simply that there was a difference between playing from a file stored in RAM and playing from one stored in an SSD).

 

An interesting experiment for anyone who has some facility with FreeBSD - do two kernel compiles from identical sources, one using SSD partitions, the other using memory disk (in FreeBSD, MD) partitions, and see which happens quicker. Back in the day I used MDs to speed up kernel compiles, but that was when the alternative was a PATA HDD.

[mwheelerk]

Yes, that is exactly what a mercifully shorter version of my report would have said. Try the FW400 ports even on drives that have 800 and even to a computer that is 800 only. And--at least with the half-dozen similar units I have--the drives that have fewer port options sounded better.

 

Can't help you on the Lacie problem. I have a couple of drives that are fussy about mounting--I have to turn them on and off a couple of times. Not sure if it is the drive mechanism or the SATA>FW bridge in the enclosure.

 

Fussy mounting is exactly my challenge with one of the drives that's why looking at an optional connection method other than using USB since I have a USB DAC interests me. I guess I go find an adapter.

[Jud]

Okay, now I have to try to find a RAMdisk utility (or the Terminal command line arguments) to allow me to adjust block size (isn't that another term, used with drives, for "allocation units?"). I hope there is one for OS X.

Still it think (hope) it more about not using other interfaces than about the speed or efficiency of the RAM disk. Yet it is too early in my experiments to conclude such. I remain open.

One thing is for certain: The differences I hear with the RAM disk (and SD card) are very real. My wife even remarked that everything was sounding almost "creepy real" as she put it.

 

The utility I use on Windows ( Primo Ramdisk (VSuite Ramdisk II) - Powerful RAM Disk Emulator for Windows ) allows saving of RAMdisks across shutdowns (nice not to have to reload music files and app each time), permits changing various parameters such as block size, and has a "Direct-IO" setting that allows higher data transfer rates. (I don't know what the non-marketing term is for "Direct-IO.") Would be very nice to find something similarly featured and convenient on OS X.

[Starre]

Interesting this SD card, I have a SD card slot on my laptop if I am not mistaken, can I use any type of SD card as long as it is reasonabley fast?

[mwheelerk]

Fussy mounting is exactly my challenge with one of the drives that's why looking at an optional connection method other than using USB since I have a USB DAC interests me. I guess I go find an adapter.

 

Cool, no adapter required. I just found I have 6-pin to 9-pin cables that came with the Lacie. I will try them tonight.

[elcorso]

Hi Roch:

I agree that RAM disk is not terribly practical or convenient, but it's really only one extra step and for critical listening it is worthwhile.

 

As for the speed issue: Certainly I see that, but based on all I went through this past week, with the SLOWER interfaces sounding better (and my SD card is pretty slow too), I really think this is more about noise and processor activity than it is about speed.

 

No doubt I have more to learn, and maybe this all will eventually lead me to a player system like XXHighEnd. (Ugh, I hate Windows and the interface of XXHighEnd is even worse.) In some ways I think the Mac mini (2010 especially) is an outlier in that it so low power, simple, and quiet. The minimalism of the unit, combined with A+ driving the USB so directly, makes it pretty close to an "audiophile" computer. Now I just need to yank the SMPS from inside the mini and hook up the nice linear we are working on!

 

Hi Alex,

 

Yes, I know, is not speed related, but 'power clean' related source.

 

On this days I'm trying to put another SSHD inside my late Mini 2012, in order to have one drive with OS and the other with music. Before attempting to do this (by iFixit instructions and kit) I will check if the effort is worth it, since large SSHD are expensive and iFixit instructions are marked as "moderate", that means "difficult". It would be easier to replace the actual SSHD for a bigger one (allowing more stored music), since my suspicions is XXHighEnd is more OS hungry when playing than A+ then I wouldn't need the independent extra SSHD to store the music.

 

Maybe Jud & acg could illuminate me regarding this because my XXHighEnd knowledge is zero.

 

Please note, I'm not saying if one player is better than the other!

 

Roch

[Jud]

Hi Alex,

 

Yes, I know, is not speed related, but 'power clean' related source.

 

On this days I'm trying to put another SSHD inside my late Mini 2012, in order to have one drive with OS and the other with music. Before attempting to do this (by iFixit instructions and kit) I will check if the effort is worth it, since large SSHD are expensive and iFixit instructions are marked as "moderate", that means "difficult". It would be easier to replace the actual SSHD for a bigger one (allowing more stored music), since my suspicions is XXHighEnd is more OS hungry when playing than A+ then I wouldn't need the independent extra SSHD to store the music.

 

Maybe Jud & acg could illuminate me regarding this because my XXHighEnd knowledge is zero.

 

Please note, I'm not saying if one player is better than the other!

 

Roch

 

Hi Roch,

 

You don't need more music storage space for XXHE, maybe less. Among the many settings for XXHE (that cause lots of folks to say "My God! I can't fly this airplane," until they find out how useful all those settings are) is one for Playback Drive. This allows you to assign the function of sending the music to RAM from whatever drive you please, regardless of the drive the file actually "lives on." It's good to assign this function to a RAMdisk, so that you are essentially double-buffering the file in RAM before playing.

 

So for XXHE you won't need more hard drive or SSD space, but you will need lots of RAM - I'd say 16GB minimum to use RAMdisks for both XXHE and the playback drive.

[esldude]

There are Linux distributions which load completely into ram. Some of them will then let you save everything to a disk or memory when shutdown. Then you reload it on the next restart so nothing is lost. Puppy Linux is one example. Stripped down OS using very few resources as well.

 

The software Jud described sounds like the same approach for a windows machine.

[cmiu]

There are Linux distributions which load completely into ram. Some of them will then let you save everything to a disk or memory when shutdown. Then you reload it on the next restart so nothing is lost. Puppy Linux is one example. Stripped down OS using very few resources as well.

 

The software Jud described sounds like the same approach for a windows machine.

 

Any debian live build based image will run from memory that (voyage for example) and because is not running any gui , IMO is quieter because the graphical card is not fired up. From fstab you can choose to sync data on USB stick only on demand.

 

Superdad thanks for comparison (and the presentation tone)

[Daudio]

My wife even remarked that everything was sounding almost "creepy real" as she put it.

 

That's interesting, since I have recently read of people reactions to 'realistic' robots. The closer the robots appearance and behavior to real, the creepier people perceive them. Seems like an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance when the real-fake difference gets small, but perceptible.

 

"creepy real" ! Perhaps you have found a new way-point on the road to audio realism

[Jud]

This says it's able to create persistent RAMdisks on OS X: https://github.com/ideamonk/Rambola

 

Note - apparently has only been tested in Snow Leopard.

[Superdad]

I've measured power draw of every single rail in my pc (SSD, USB card, cpu, 12v/5v/3.3v into the P24 motherboard socket) which has given me some good insight into how XXHE manages the computer power. Yes, XXHE is designed so that we are able to 'smooth' out system demands and therefore power use during playback. With the two ramdisks, some cpu underclocking and o/s tweaks within the XXHE software the power draw on the important cpu 12v rail and the o/s SSD becomes a simple, rhythmical event. XXHE is a true memory player in that it upsamples and converts to WAV the entire playlist before playback commences and stores these files on the Playback Drive (in my case a 5GB ramdisk) and then all that needs to happen is to break up these files and send them to the dac as is required. You can even use XXHE to specifiy how large these file segments are which in turn affects the frequency of the rhythm I mentioned before...large segment = low frequency...small segments = high frequency. As I said earlier, I could measure the effects of changes in the XXHE software on the behaviour of power draw on a number of rails, and the sound that I liked most corresponded with the lowest and flattest/smoothest draws from those rails.

 

Now, how does A+ handle the memory play? I don't honestly know, but when I purchased a Mac Mini and optimised it earlier this year Amarra was the one that struck me as the most likely mac candidate for a true memory player, and was the player that I liked the sound of most. According to my experience, the best sound comes when the computer power usage is regular and relatively low, so a ramdisk should help in a lot of situations because it can be used to eliminate other sources of noise within the computer and to regulate cpu activity during playback.

 

Anthony (acg): Nice to meet you, and thank you (and everyone else here) for your insightful contributions. I think is is fascinating that you probed all the voltage rails realtime! Indeed, my friend, the esteemed Mr. Swenson is getting interested in putting both logic and RF probes into a server running different software and buffering techniques.

 

As I've always been clear about, I am neither an engineer nor a programmer (though I have long fraternized with both), and my forays into computer audio these past 8 or 9 years has been almost exclusively with Macs (no phobia of Windows, just a distaste).

In addition, I only post about what I have experienced first hand in my own dedicated listening room (good acoustics and great gear).

 

I certainly intend to play around more with the RAMdisk (and will see if I can find OS X s/w allowing block size adjustment), and with the 32GB SDHC card that just arrived today (wondering about what directory structure I should format it to).

 

I may also invest in an SSD for the internal OS/app drive--if only to see if those SATA SSDs are electrically quieter (less emissive) than a spinning 2.5" drive. This brings me to the one point I want to make--and I leave open the possibility that I will at some point experience something to prove the opposite:

 

At this point I do NOT think that speed of transfer of the music data off the medium (be it internal or external HD, SSD, SD card, or RAM) is a significant factor in the SQ variances I have heard (as I said, SSD is the one I have not yet heard). Rather I really think it is about which method generates the fewest extra electrical signals and processor activity.

 

This could also go a long way to explain why any of these things matter to a memory player music app.(Edit: I see this strong statement needs more support than provided at the moment; the farm memory play should not care, but maybe things are going on in the machine even after the song is fully loaded; There is always more going on in me when I'm fully loaded! ;-O)

 

How about some data points:

SpeedTools, a utility supplied with OWC drives, has a handy "Test Data Transfer Integrity" tool which simultaneously writes and reads data (in whatever test block size you wish, 1MB as the default), runs a graph of parallel lines (one each read/write), and shows low/max/avg. rates in MB/sec. It is fun to watch the lines and see which storage mediums are smoothest and which show a lot of variance (RAMdisk having the biggest jumps). So averages with what I have on hand:

 

External FW800 drive: 83MB/sec

External FW400 drive: 40 MB/sec.

Internal SATA HD: 130MB/sec.

2GB (50X) SD Card: 11MB/sec.

RAM Disk: 788MB/sec.

 

Now, based on sonic rankings (worst to best above), we can all see that my numbers don't indicate that slower is better. But nor do they prove that faster is better since the FW400 sounds to me much better than FW800 (especially in enclosures that don't have FW800 or other ports); and the snail-paced SD card smokes the internal--and more than 10x the speed--SATA.

 

Yes, the lightning-fast RAM disk sounds better than them all, but the SD card is far and away closer in sound to the RAM disk than it is to any of the other methods. The whole ultra black background, infinite detail, amazing transient thing that I am so thrilled about is there with both the sluggish SD card and the blazing RAM disk (just a bit more so with the latter).

 

So if I have an interest in an SSD--or finding a way to load the OS into RAM--it is because I would like the internal SATA interface to shut up entirely. No I know that is not really possible, but one idea I have is to install Mavericks and A+ onto this 32GB SD I just got, then boot from it and eject the SATA. But the real trick would be to then disconnect the internal HD from the SATA bus connector so the machine does not even poll or see that drive. The 32GB SD I just got is a speed class 10 piece, so I am sure it will run faster than 11MB/sec., otherwise boot times and other ops would really suffer.

 

Thoughts, suggestions? Counterpoints to my notion that speed is not the factor in SQ?

[jamesg11]

I want the creepy real coming out of my speakers asap - so who's going to do the XXHE OSX equivalent, a start-up?

 

BTW, the sd card in my 2011 mini, non-usb I think, definitely gave superior sonics in the upper mids & top end - in the couple of albums I loaded yesterday into the 8gb card at least. Not the same all round lift I got with the mini's new psu & ssd, but of course this is an additional improvement. Very pleasing.

[Superdad]

That's interesting, since I have recently read of people reactions to 'realistic' robots. The closer the robots appearance and behavior to real, the creepier people perceive them. Seems like an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance when the real-fake difference gets small, but perceptible.

 

"creepy real" ! Perhaps you have found a new way-point on the road to audio realism

 

Hey, I've been looking for a house in "uncanny valley" for years. But the real-estate there is not quite real enough to get a bank loan.

[Jud]

Thoughts, suggestions? Counterpoints to my notion that speed is not the factor in SQ?

 

Have a look at acg's sig over on the Phasure forum to get an idea of both his hardware and his settings. Have a look at PeterSt's post there about RAMdisks. (BTW, in some of Peter's recent posts he's mentioned both RAMdisks and NAS for his music files.)

[Superdad]

Have a look at acg's sig over on the Phasure forum to get an idea of both his hardware and his settings. Have a look at PeterSt's post there about RAMdisks. (BTW, in some of Peter's recent posts he's mentioned both RAMdisks and NAS for his music files.)

 

I will, thanks. Not that I particularly care, but do you suppose my coming to these by-ear sonic conclusions independently (on the Mac)--without any knowledge or attention paid to other groups who have gone down this road and arrived at the place--earns me any credibility with the "heavy objectivist" crowd? Don't worry, I am not holding my breath. ;-)

[elcorso]

I tried the Ram Disc. Didn't liked it since I got some harsh in upper registers in human voice, like in Ryan Adams's ""Heartbreaker", the only thing I love is the speed...

 

Will try the SD Card.

 

Roch

[mayhem13]

Ok so I picked up two sticks of 4gb Crucial ram to go with the two I already have for a total of 16gb. I'm fortunate to have two identical windows machines my son and I put together last Christmas with all hardware and OS being the same and both of us run iTunes for our libraries. I'm adding and configuring the BIOS as i type this for some extensive AB listening tomorrow night. Both machines will be connected to my DAC switching inputs to my main system.

 

I 'WANT' to be able to discern a difference between RAMdisk playback and from a standard 7200 HDD so against my usual concerns, I'll be using music familiar to me. I'll try standard Redbook first and HiRes PCM with each against opposing machines. I won't be taking any standard measurements but instead, reporting my findings purely subjectively. That being said, and wanting to hear a difference, my son will be at the helm doing the switching so I won't be aware of which is RAMdisk and which is HDD playback sampling the same tracks of the same resolution across the same interface of one DAC, eliminating as many variables as physically possible. Should have some viable results to report back by the weekend. Stay tuned as subjective reports aren't something I do often, if ever.....but Alex has my interest peaked here.

[sandyk]

Mayhem13

Lotsa luck defeating that huge chunk of Expectation Bias ! (grin)

TBH, I expect that any additional software processing for your speakers will make both sound identical.

 

Alex

[phatoldsun]

I have a current generation MBP non Retina that I swapped out the HDD for a Samsung 830 SSD and added 8 GB RAM. Music is stored on NAS (FLAC) and 1TB HDD drive (ALAC/AIFF) via Firewire 800. Playback software is A+. It all sounds great, works fine, except for when I'm traveling or on local Wi-fi I don't have access to my entire library.

I thought the general consensus was that using an external storage solution was better because of larger storage options (obviously) and because the storage drive was separated from the source/playback machine. This puts a potential noise source father away.

I'm considering replacing the optical drive in my Mac with a 1 TB HDD, using the kit from OWC. My current iTunes library is about 700GBs, so I'd have a little room to grow. I have the NAS too, but I'm traveling more lately and would love to have my whole library on the Mac.

If I'm following Superdad's findings, most of the top ranked storage solutions are internal. This is an interesting considering I thought a separate drive had advantages for SQ.

So I'm looking for a simple suggestion (or excuse) to replace the optical drive with a HDD. Is the SQ improvement via SATA another reason to do this?

[mayhem13]

Going all analog path after the DAC on this one Alex with my fully passive 2.5 ways, subs off. The 2.5's feature 2 180mm midwoofers and do a nice flat in room response to 40hz with an F3 around 34hz or so. While these aren't my favorite speakers, they are IMO the most revealing and the flattest anechoic response in my collection.