Oppo BD95 as a streamer

[Reid Malenfant]

Perhaps some nice kind person could help out a streaming thicko here

I have an Oppo BD95 universal player that has an E-SATA socket on the rear of the unit. Apparently it'll recognise FLAC & other goodies sitting on an external HDD & act like a streamer.

But just what the heck is an E-SATA cable?

Am I being naive in assuming that all I need is possibly an external HDD in a caddy, PSU for the HDD & this E-SATA connection thing?

Apart from files on the HDD of course


I'd like to give it a try & I'd like to get things organised so I don't have to pull everything out of the rack again to install it.. So sooner the better really

[Tim]

Yup, you have pretty much got it right Mark - eSATA is just an external SATA connection and many external Hard Drive enclosures have eSATA connections, so all you would need is to plug it into the OPPO and away you go playing music files.



eSATA is a different connection to SATA but thats the only difference, you can connect ordinary SATA drives to an eSATA socket.

[Tim]

I'm just looking for some caddies for you, eSATA ones tend to be a little more pricey than a USB external drive. You can buy a nice caddy by Lian Li or IcyBox with an eSATA connection and just pop in your own hard drive.

[Reid Malenfant]

Ah, cheers Tim, at least I wasn't a country mile out after all

[Tim]

Ah, cheers Tim, at least I wasn't a country mile out after all

Nah, spot on really - its just another connector which should give you the same transfer speeds as fitting a SATA drive internally to the motherboard. Very popular with folk who build their own music streamers who don't want to fit a mechanical drive inside the player box, but still want the same transfer speeds. Some caddies don't give you the exact same transfer speeds, but you are still way ahead of a USB connection.

[Reid Malenfant]

I guess I'll be needing a quality DVD/CD ROM drive to rip with to won't I Lappy drive not really up to the job.

Some kind of software as well? I can rip to an ISO file, but I'm not sure if the Oppo will recognise it or not..

This is where I start not knowing a lot


Cheers for your help so far fella

[Tim]

Here's a couple of starter's for ten - you should have the idea now.



http://www.amazon.co.uk/Icy-Box-Ib-3...tp_s2_edpp_url

Lian Li make very good quality enclosures, with single bays all the way up to 5 like this one.



http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lian-Li-eSAT...263799&sr=1-28

[slate]

I bought this cable a while back; it has been handy several times
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...ls_o02_s00_i00

Granted it can not Work with the heavier 3,5" drives as they likely Draw to much current for the eSATAp; in that case the drive will need it's own supply

[Ali Tait]

BTW, very interested in this Mark, please keep us up to date on how it goes.

[Reid Malenfant]

Right guys, I really want to go somewhere with this kind of like right now

I overdid things going out last Friday & then shopping on Sunday, so I had another few days on my back to calm things down. However, just before I did that I had BT Infinity installed, & I kind of had a look about for some music... I made sure the engineer left me more than enough cable, so I simply took everything except the hifi upstairs

Lets just say that I now have over 15Gb of FLAC albums & it's growing at a rapid rate

What's more is they sound stunning! I only tried one out & nearly crapped myself at the quality, that's using Winamp on my laptop & the V-Link. Listening to a few more now & I know I'm onto a winner, gotta be as none of the albums have cost me a penny

There must be thousands out there for free on FLAC, just type Netlable music into google... I still haven't finished downloading from the first one I came accross


So, looking at things the best bang on Tb for the buck appears to be a 2Tb drive... Western digital appear to be the dogs danglies, but the Caviar Black are damn expensive (5 year guarantee), though the Caviar Green are looking good price wise with a 3 year guarantee...

Any other suggestions for a 2Tb HDD? Seagate & Samsung are out of the window as they are now one & the same...

Oh, I guess I'll need two of them One as a backup...

Now I need some suggestions for a caddy, though it needs to have both an eSATA & USB2 port... One so I can load the data from my lappy, the other so I can plug it into the Oppo...

This doesn't look too bad, I have seen plastic ones at over £20... Again any suggestions more than welcome


Hopefully I can get stuff on the way here by early next week