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Just the facts, ma'am.....

Posted by AbeCollins (A) on August 7, 2024 at 10:24:34

In Reply to: Imagine however you please :) posted by E-Stat on August 6, 2024 at 19:08:40:

True. The benchmark results for HDDs vs SSDs on their own don't lie. The SSD offers much greater IOPs and MB/Sec throughput. But do SSDs offer usable performance gains when streaming music from a NAS? No.

Even an old 3.5" HDD on its own is at least one order of magnitude (10x) faster than needed (IOPs or MB/Sec) for streaming hi-res music. Music playback data is primarily sequential, not random I/O so....

Very old 3.5" SATA HDDs are capable of at least 100 MB/Sec while a 2-ch 24/192 hi-res stream requires less than 10 MB/Sec. So that old HDD is at least one order of magnitude (10x) faster than needed. Many modern 3.5" HDDs will be 2 to 3 orders of magnitude faster than needed.

The end result when playing music from NAS makes no difference whether you have SSD or HDD in the NAS. An SSD capable of several hundred MB/Sec or thousands of IOPs won't do any better than an old HDD in a NAS playing music. Remember, we only need 10 MB/Sec for hi-res 2-ch 24/192.

And we haven't even mentioned the NAS 1-Gigabit/Sec network bottleneck that chokes the performance of your SSDs down to no more than 125 MB/Sec theoretical max over the network.... no better than the HDDs in the NAS.

Did you actually noticea a performance gain streaming from NAS when you switched from HDDs to SSDs? Maybe you did but like anything in audio the hard FACTS rarely matter ;-)

Edits: 08/07/24 08/07/24

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