Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles
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Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles
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Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles
#2Many years ago I knew an audiophile who got those crazy magazines and catalogues listing CD players for thousands of dollars and cables for hundreds.
One CD player that stood out had all sorts of sales-speak that was obviously bullpoop. For example, it said the CD player "bathes the underside of the CD in blue laser light" to make the data laser work better. There were plenty of other silly voodoo technologies this player offered.
It took a while, but I explained to my friend that bits are bits. If a bit is a one, it's a one. There's no such thing as a "fancy", audiophiles-pay-more-and-get-a-better-version of one. Same with zero.
I told him the bits could be written in crayon, sent across a desert on camelback, and reassembled a year later, and those same bits would still be the same bits
If there are scratches and a player has to correct and guess, that's different, but if your CDs are clean and your clock is good, and you're sending bits digitally to your D/A & amp, there's literally no difference between one player and another. None. Zero.
After an hour and a dozen examples, something clicked in his head and he finally understood. It was very interesting to hear how I blew his mind, and how he'd never see all the sales speak BS the same way again.
As for SSDs, I can see how plenty of cheap computers have noisy electronics which can lead to noisy audio, and how power usage fluctuations can cause noise, but if putting caps on your SSD makes that better, then there are bigger problems.
Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles
#3No vacuum tubes? NO SALE
Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles
#4I would have preferred a review that wasn’t quite as dismissive. SSDs have periodic higher read latency that could impact audio playback if the host buffers aren’t large enough. The flash translation layer periodically reshuffles data, even when the workload is just reads. I expect this drive is duplicating the data internally, and pivoting back and forth between the two copies, targeting one which is not performing garbage collection at that time. This mechanism would result in more consistent, lower latency read performance. It might even be more advanced than that - triple mirroring the data - hardening the data to two copies first, while serving the non impacted read blocks from the third copy. Although the other SSD claims do sound ridiculous, consistent read performance is a nice feature. This type of capability is expected in enterprise storage, it may have some use in consumer class storage applications, besides just audio.
Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles
#5I would have preferred a review that wasn’t quite as dismissive. SSDs have periodic higher read latency that could impact audio playback if the host buffers aren’t large enough. The flash translation layer periodically reshuffles data, even when the workload is just reads. I expect this drive is duplicating the data internally, and pivoting back and forth between the two copies, targeting one which is not performing…
For pure listening, latency is totally irrelevant as long as the buffers are large enough, and that's a software thing. Heck, one complete audio CD fits uncompressed in one GB of RAM...
Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles
#6I would have preferred a review that wasn’t quite as dismissive. SSDs have periodic higher read latency that could impact audio playback if the host buffers aren’t large enough. The flash translation layer periodically reshuffles data, even when the workload is just reads. I expect this drive is duplicating the data internally, and pivoting back and forth between the two copies, targeting one which is not performing…
I think your mental model of how SSDs work is a bit inaccurate. Read operations will not trigger wear leveling during normal use. Reads will only cause the SSD to start moving data around if there's a correctable ECC error with the read, prompting the drive to write a fresh and corrected copy. Correctable read errors can crop up from data degradation over time, or from read disturb errors (analogous to DRAM rowhammer). Neither of those causes are even remotely likely unless you have a highly atypical workload that does not at all fit an audio use case. The probability of a latency spike due to these causes leading to an audible glitch is small enough that it should be entirely ignored.
If you're worried about read latency on a scale that could affect an audio workload, the only change to the SSD that might be relevant would be disabling the low-power idle modes, which can take a while to wake up from. Enterprise SSDs have other measures to manage QoS targets that are tighter than what an audio use case requires, and those features are only necessary when dealing with a workload that includes a heavy volume of write operations—not relevant to audiophiles. And enterprise drives definitely don't need to duplicate all your data as a way of avoiding high read latency; it's possible to suspend write operations in order to service a read request that needs to access the same physical block.
Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles
#7No vacuum tubes? NO SALE
Tubes are probably the one thing that actually can have a real effect on the sound of an amp. The key word there is “can”.
Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles
#8I would have preferred a review that wasn’t quite as dismissive. SSDs have periodic higher read latency that could impact audio playback if the host buffers aren’t large enough. The flash translation layer periodically reshuffles data, even when the workload is just reads. I expect this drive is duplicating the data internally, and pivoting back and forth between the two copies, targeting one which is not performing…
I'd worry more about electrical interference than read latency.
Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles
#9Many years ago I knew an audiophile who got those crazy magazines and catalogues listing CD players for thousands of dollars and cables for hundreds. One CD player that stood out had all sorts of sales-speak that was obviously bullpoop. For example, it said the CD player "bathes the underside of the CD in blue laser light" to make the data laser work better. There were plenty of other silly voodoo technologies this p…
Yeah on the digital side, it doesn't matter much. It's when you get to the analogue side where quality matters. Although this is not mentioning the fact that past a certain point of quality, human ears can't discern the difference and it becomes more of a placebo.
Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles
#10I would have preferred a review that wasn’t quite as dismissive. SSDs have periodic higher read latency that could impact audio playback if the host buffers aren’t large enough. The flash translation layer periodically reshuffles data, even when the workload is just reads. I expect this drive is duplicating the data internally, and pivoting back and forth between the two copies, targeting one which is not performing…
I think your mental model of how SSDs work is a bit inaccurate. Read operations will not trigger wear leveling during normal use. Reads will only cause the SSD to start moving data around if there's a correctable ECC error with the read, prompting the drive to write a fresh and corrected copy. Correctable read errors can crop up from data degradation over time, or from read disturb errors (analogous to DRAM rowhammer…
Do SSDs do background reads to refresh data as the charge slowly leaks or catch any other sort of corruption?