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Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles

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11–20 of 32 posts

Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles

#11
post #4

I 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…

>SSDs have periodic higher read latency that could impact audio playback if the host buffers aren’t large enough.

In what scenario is audio streamed direct from an ssd rather than memory?

Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles

#12
post #2

Many 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…

Sometimes the USB cable which connects my iPhone to my Honda Civic degrades. I have to replace it every 6 months or so.

It doesn't kill the connection, but audio quality goes down very noticeably. Replacing it with a new one seems to fix it for the next half-year. Is this real? Whats the mechanism behind it?

Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles

#14
post #13

No measured data AND no hearing experience. Now that's what I call serious journalism!

Would you expect them to take measurements or do a double blind test if I was selling invisible pink dragons to improve audio quality and they were reporting on it? If anything, I thought the article was too tame.

Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles

#15
post #2

Many 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…

Sometimes the USB cable which connects my iPhone to my Honda Civic degrades. I have to replace it every 6 months or so. It doesn't kill the connection, but audio quality goes down very noticeably. Replacing it with a new one seems to fix it for the next half-year. Is this real? Whats the mechanism behind it?

Likely the cable gets physically damaged, which degrades the signal integrity on the cable. Basically if the cable is cut there will not be any signal anymore, but there can also be states somewhere in between.

With reduced integrity the chance of data loss or corruption during transmission increases. There are typically low level integrity checks and forward error correction used to compensate for some of that on serial links, but they can only do so much. If data is detected lost its pretty much up to the upper level protocol on what to do next: One could retransmit, do nothing, or just use the corrupted data. Since retransmission would not help audio protocols they likely will use the other options, and so you get degraded sound.

Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles

#16
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's the kind of internal information that is seldom disclosed by SSD manufacturers. Toward the end of the planar NAND era there were several notable cases of vendors having to add background reads/scrubbing because data retention was quite poor with tiny planar TLC cells, and there were measurable performance losses when reading stale data due to the extra ECC required to recover the original data. There are also some enterprise drives or array appliances that have documented behavior where after a long period of being unpowered, they'll operate with reduced performance for a while while a scrub is done.

But for normal use cases, you're either writing enough data that everything on the drive ends up refreshed at least once or twice per year, or you're writing so little data that your flash is basically not getting worn out at all and the retention times will be extremely long, so you're left worrying about read disturb errors which are pretty unlikely to grow into uncorrectable errors without a rowhammer-like workload.

I'm pretty sure most consumer SSDs are not doing full-drive scrubs after every power loss, both because I've never seen evidence of that while measuring SSD power consumption and because it would be insane to do given that it is common for the SSD to be completely powered off every time you close the lid of your laptop.

Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles

#18
post #2

Many 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…

Sometimes the USB cable which connects my iPhone to my Honda Civic degrades. I have to replace it every 6 months or so. It doesn't kill the connection, but audio quality goes down very noticeably. Replacing it with a new one seems to fix it for the next half-year. Is this real? Whats the mechanism behind it?

Cars are terrible environments for electronics, the temperatures in there range from freezing to sweltering and you can be sure that the tiny gauge wire in most cheap usb cables will pay the price from the constant expansion/contraction cycle day by day.

This can cause resistance pockets in the wire itself especially when since it's probably continuously moved around every time you plug in the phone, further stressing the wires.

Lastly condensation inside the car can corrode contacts slowly causing further signal degradation.

Your best bet would be a thicker gauge wire usb cable with gold contacts.

Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles

#19
post #4

I 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…

> SSDs have periodic higher read latency that could impact audio playback if the host buffers aren’t large enough.

Buffering sufficient to deal with a CD reader losing tracking and needing to reacquire it, which takes an order of magnitude longer than all but the most pathological flash management scenarios, has been an utterly boring consumer-grade feature since the late 90s.

Re: Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles

#20
post #2

Many 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.

And money buys higher quality to a point, but when you get into boutique stuff you can end up fighting the fact that the volume simply isn't there to support a high-end engineering effort. That's why you can spend $2000 on a CD player and end up with something that has inferior audio quality to a launch-model PlayStation.
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