Using an SSD HD as your music Library to replace your USB HD

[Filterlab]

Being in IT I’ve been using SSD for years in everything (including the PS4). Much better than hard drives, data streaming is around 9x quicker, little heat, no moving parts, very reliable.

Why wouldn’t you? Well, SSDs are essentially like millions of light switches. If a failure occurs then recovery is exceptionally unlikely as ‘off’ is ‘off’, whereas HDDs tend to fail gradually on the whole, and leave a magnetic footprint of data which can relatively easily recovered.

Saying that, a Crucial or Samsung (I favour Samsung) SSD hardly ever fails. I use either in all the SSD upgrades I do on Macs.

Whatever you do, make sure you have at least two backups. That’s a good rule for all computer systems. I’ve seen clients lose their businesses due to lost data, because they didn’t have a backup in place.

[Pharos]

I was told, rightly or wrongly, that SSDs have inbuilt alternative circuits which can come in and substitute, and override the failed transistors, is that right?

[Mr. C]

I would suggest for quality FBA playback SSD would be a minimum requirement

[Filterlab]

I was told, rightly or wrongly, that SSDs have inbuilt alternative circuits which can come in and substitute, and override the failed transistors, is that right?

Not to my knowledge, when they fail, that’s it normally. They tend to fail on block count when they go wrong. Most operating systems will work around it and mark the bad sectors as with hard drives, but if data resides on those blocks then it’s lost unless the failure is gradual, which is unlikely on an SSD.

If the last block becomes unreadable then the drive is dead and the data lost. As with any storage system, regular checks are essential (Drive DX is the best for Mac, Techtool Pro is also good) and replacing the drive immediately upon a warning is a must-do. That’s why multiple back ups are required as it’s easier to restore from a working back up than try and recover data from a failing or failed drive.

[Clive]

Doesn't Windows intelligently handle SSDs in some way, probably better than Linux O/Ss for a Pi which probably simply treat SSDs as an HDD?

[Filterlab]

The only extra handling over an HDD is garbage collection (TRIM), but that’s mostly taken care of by the SSD firmware these days.

Macs have a TRIM system built in which is utilised on their computers with a factory SSD, but it’s disabled for third party drives, but again it’s usually handled by the drive itself or by manually running a repair on Disk Utility.

[Shovel_Knight]

The only extra handling over an HDD is garbage collection (TRIM), but that’s mostly taken care of by the SSD firmware these days.

Macs have a TRIM system built in which is utilised on their computers with a factory SSD, but it’s disabled for third party drives, but again it’s usually handled by the drive itself or by manually running a repair on Disk Utility.

Since OS X 10.11, it's possible to enable TRIM for any SSD on a Mac: sudo trimforce enable

USB SSDs usually don't support TRIM since this is originally a SCSI command. Only drives that support UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol) support TRIM over USB. There's no difference between Windows and Linux when handling UASP-enabled USB drives, macOS doesn't support TRIM over USB at all so in the end it all depends on the drive's internal garbage collection.

[Filterlab]

Indeed, that's why it's not worth running the trimforce command, the firmware on SSDs takes care of garbage collection, and the wear levelling is so ludicrously high on SSDs these days that in most cases the write limits won't be hit before the computer is replaced anyway.

[Silent]

Okay copy of my music files is finished now . The slow copying is because it is from the 4 TB USB HD plugged in to my laptop and the USB 3 socket is broken so has to be USB 2 . I plug the Cruxial CX8 SSD in to my Raspberry Pi 4 and that has USB 3 so the transfer from that to streaming should be quicker .

Turned off my LMS removed the USB HD replaced it with the SSD HD and then did a full rescan after first mounting the SSD HD . The scan took pretty much the same as the USB HD used to and I have not noticed anything in the way of speed gains.

Now the crazy part that i find very hard to believe the sound is most definitely better and not by a little . I know that the digital files on both HD's are identical and i know that when they were ripped they were checked to be perfect digital copies of the original digital file on the CD . There is no way they should sound anything but the same , maybe they do and are the same and this is just my brain playing tricks . End result is i am not bothered for as long as it lasts will just enjoy what i hear . I am not encouraging anyone else to do this nor wouldI have any confidence that someone else would hear it . But for me at least it exists and makes my music sound more real and more enjoyable with the most improvement to many of the poor recordings / masterings (but great music ) that I have . It does not make them sound like a polished sound of say Yello but it does make them easier and more enjoyable to listen to .

Thank you all for your warnings on the possible failure of the SSD it is noted . I have three separate USB HD Drives all backed up with my full music Library as I rip new CD's they are copied to all . One is attached to my router , one attached to my PC and one is kept safe and not plugged in so if something zaps the Network and gets the others that one will still be there. I also still have all of the physical CD's as well so if the very worst happens I can always rip everything all over again.

I have a Zen Mini 3 streamer which has a built in SSD and CD drive for getting music onto the SSD. Before I ripped any CDs onto it I took a USB HD with Back In Black on it and plugged it in the back, tested the sound for about 2 hours on the tracks I know well before removing the HD, ripping the exact same CD onto the SSD and trying another two hours or so with the version on the SSD. I have to say that the SQ was noticably improved (albeit not drastically), mainly the high end stuff was a little bit cleaner sounding and the music just felt like it flowed a bit better. I went into the experiment assuming that there would be no discernable difference as I wasn't sure that the technology differed enough to affect SQ but I was pleasently surprised. The version on the HD and the SSD were from the same CD and both WAV files.

[StanleyB]

I have been into SSD for more than ten years now. I even have a dedicated laptop for just music. It can run for 5 hours or more on a fully charged battery, which means no mains borne noise spikes etc.
As for back up: I run a system back up of the C drive once a month, which takes care of any Windows updates etc that might have happened during that month. That's done on another dedicated 240GB SSD, which are now less than £30.
The music etc files are on a separate partition. To back those up I use the Synchronize function in a program called Directory Opus, and synchronize the files on that partitions with a 4TB Western Digital mechanical drive. Only the updated files are then copied. I tend to leave deleted files from the SSD on the external drive, just in case I do happen to need that deleted file one day.
One thing that the SSD allows me to do, but that I struggled with when I was using the mechanical drive, is playback of 24/192 and 32/192 WAV files. They would normally have to be FLAC instead if I wanted to avoid timing and buffering issues.
As for TRIM etc. I leave that to Windows. But for anyone using SSD, consider leaving at least 10% of your drive untouched. Once you enter that zone you can have all sorts of negative issues with the drive. One of them is a slower access and write speed. The other is a lack of spare space for the system to use as a buffer.