As I mentioned elsewhere I have a new toy. In the underside of this new toy is a compartment easily accessed by the simple act of unscrewing a small plate that covers the aforementioned compartment.
Exposing this cavity one can insert an SSD card of up to 4tb capacity. I have no experience of such esoteric devices and was wondering if I need to purchase an SSD card with or without a heatsink. Fitting it will be a doddle once I scrape the cash together to purchase one however I not certain if a card with a large heatsink will fit. Would a card with a slimmer sticker type of heat dispersion suffice assuming thata heatsink type is considered desirable? I intend using this internal storage to rip some CDs to it along with digital flac files purchased from Qobuz.
My thanks in advance and anticipation. You there boy! Wake up at the back! There is nothing inherently funny about the word cavity!
ATM. A tedious tech post about SSD cards.
by 43 Comments
One of the “joys” of Solid State Drives is they don’t consume much power, so don’t get hot and don’t require a heatsink. The other main joy being they run silently due to lack of moving parts.
The SSDs which do have heatsinks are designed for cloud data hubs and the like, the paltry few MB/s required for hi-res audio is unlikely to be a taxing load.
Note that your new toy only supports M.2 (NVMe PCIe3.0) 2280 protocol SSDs, so don’t go buying one with a SATA interface (the sort which look like a laptop drive).
And always make a backup.
Thanks Fents. I knew I could rely on your sage advice. That will save me a few quid. I know which version I need, evidently it will be happy with a gen 3 or a gen 4. I was a little concerned about heat due to it being installed in a closed compartment and obviously with no fan cooling. The new toy does have venting along both sides though. Having played with it for quite a few hours over the five days I’ve had it I must say it doesn’t run hot. It gets slightly warm but certainly not temperatures approaching anything concerning.
There are also M.2 SATA SSDs, although some manufacturers have stopped producing them. They can be told apart by the slots in the end connector, as seen in this link.
https://www.kingston.com/unitedkingdom/en/blog/pc-performance/two-types-m2-vs-ssd
M.2 SATA SSDs should work in an NVMe slot, but not vice-versa.
Thanks JQW. That was also most useful. I have earmarked a WD drive that fits the bill and thanks to your useful link I now know I’ve chosen the correct type. 🙏
Good to see the odd serbo-croat post on here.
Potpuno moje zadovoljstvo moj stari prijatelju.
Well, precisely, you are too kind.
Diolch mon ami.
I just thought of a second related question. How should I format the critter? exFat? NTFS?
According to the user manual, it supports NTFS, exFAT and FAT32. The OS will almost certainly be Linux-based and will format the drive as it best sees fit, which will almost certainly be exFAT.
If you’re bored, have a gander at this:
https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/exfat-vs-ntfs/
Thanks Fents, from what I’ve gleaned it gives you a choice in a screen pop up. I’ve read conflicting info about this relating to the new toy on various forums. Some people say exFAT some NTFS hence my confusion and I trust youse lot to know what you’re on about. So I thought I’d ask.
Edit: OK I read that through and picking out the parts of it that I understand I guess It looks like exFAT would suit the purpose.
Yes, it all gets very technical very quickly.
On a CD, the bits are arranged in a long continuous sequence, starting at the beginning and ending at the end, with a few markers along the way for track IDs. Tracks can be any size from 0.1 seconds to 80+ minutes.
A hard drive is divided up into a huge number of “sectors” of equal size/capacity. If a sector is 1Mbyte and you store a file of 1kbit, that sector is full, even though 99.99% of it is empty. Over time, some sectors go bad and they have to be ignored. All of this reduces the storage capacity. This is why “repartitioning” (shuffling data around) a hard drive can increase its capacity.
NAND Flash memory is divided into equal-size pages and over time some bytes go bad. Data is scattered around the pages to allow for this, by a process called “wear-levelling”, and there’s clever error-recovery stuff in case a bit is lost to a bad byte.
You won’t notice any of this as it all happens in the background. But exFAT is written with Flash memory as the target application.
You carry all this around in your head! Blimey. I can stretch and gesso a canvas in my sleep but this is another level of knowing stuff. I like things I can just plug in and they work.
🙏
I have to learn stuff for work, then it tends to stick. But my brain is full, so other stuff, like family birthdays, gets shunted out.
The first mp3 player I designed used a tiny (1″, or thereabouts) spinning hard drive. It was slow, power-hungry, low capacity and broke if you dropped it.
The last mp3 player I designed used four of NAND Flash memory chips connected together with a memory controller chip. It had a total capacity of 16GB. Laughable now, but only 15 years ago.
My colleague left to join Apple, a year or so later the iPhone launched and the whole world changed.
The pace of change is bewilderingly fast especially when the tech goes into full production. I remember seeing a piece on tv a while ago about the early development of Oled screens and how the best size screen that could be produced by R&D at the time was about A5 in paper sizes now they are absolutely huge and in a very short development cycle for such impressive change. I sometimes wonder if the changes take place too rapidly and perhaps tech gets superceded before it’s given the chance to fully blossom but I guess rapid change has become the norm. Perhaps with the demands that places upon the planet that will alter. I see that tech companies are beginning to offer phones with far better life spans so maybe the penny is beginning to drop or is it being used as just a cynical marketing ploy. Perhaps a little of both?
There’s a spreadsheet somewhere tracking the realisation of the anticipated benefit of ‘greening’ their approach to these things. If the trend falls off, and the benefit isn’t seen to be being realised, they’ll change tack and go back to an unadulterated tech feature war strategy.
Do you ever get called cynical Foxy?
I do. I look upon those that call me that with a mixture of puzzlement and pity.
If anyone is even vaguely entranced by what would in any sane world easily be by a considerable margin considered by any reasonable person the most exciting thread in living memory I have thrilling news to impart…
Number one great nephew has gifted me a SSD which I have successfully installed and formatted. Now for some ripping yarns.
Phwoar! *Rubs thighs*
Ooooh Misssus!
Grunties!!
Does it rip the CDs into uncompressed files? Wav or whatever?
Yep. WAV is on offer if that’s your poison. I’m happy enough with FLAC. Easy UI although figuring out how to get the folder(s) available in the Music app after ripping them to the SSD resulted in a little bit of light head scratching but I’ve sussed that out now.
So far it’s an impressive piece of kit.
FLAC is equivalent to WAV, a lossless compressed version
Yup.
Nope – WAV is uncompressed, shurely? So not strictly equivalent? Where’s @fentonsteve when you need him??
Equivalent in an audio sense. FLAC is a lossless compressed version of WAV. The original WAV file can be 100% recreated (digitally exactly the same) from the FLAC version, FLAC just saves on storage, no deterioration in sound.
Say original WAV file is A and then compressed FLAC version is B, then uncompress that to create file C.
A (WAV)-> compress B (FLAC) -> uncompress -> C (WAV)
A unix diff command (or equivalent) will declare that files A and C are identical. No differences at all.
They sound identical to me so using FLAC makes more sense to reduce the size of the files.
Coolio.
That’s because what you are hearing *is* identical!
Precisely.
My understanding was that sample rate and bit depth were both higher in WAV files.
But I’m happy to stand corrected – not for the last time, I’m sure…
Nope
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC
Well, that’s me told (again) – dai takes a hard line, doesn’t he?
@fitterstoke just echoing your “nope”
They sound identical to me too, Mr Squeezer. But then I’m over 60 and no longer have FFSS ears…
I’m closer to seventy than sixty and I still have my ears. Both of them. I know this because my specs aren’t lopsided.
If you uncompress a FLAC file and then play the resulting WAV file, it’s identical to the WAV file that was compressed in the first place. If you play a FLAC file, it will be uncompressed on the fly and it’s possible that a little information could be lost in order to keep the resulting stream uninterrupted. Depends on the player hardware/firmware/software.
In theory yes, but technology has moved on so that it is no longer an issue, or at least not in the last 15 years or so.
The first mp3 player I worked on could not play 16-bit WAV files without stuttering, but could happily play Flac files (typically two thirds the size/data rate).
The next mp3 player I worked on, 6 or 12 months later, could do 24/96!
Sorry, I was in bed with a thimble full of Night Nurse. Slept for 11 hours. Woke up this morning and I’ve lost my voice.
I went to a gig for an hour last week and stood at the back to avoid the crowd. Still caught the bug, though. I won’t be going to any more gigs until Spring.
Anyway, think of Flac as being like Zip files for audio and you’re not far off. Plus Flac, unlike Wav*, can hold metadata (Artist, Album, Track Name, Track Number, etc) and artwork.
(*) It is possible with certain very niche types of Wav file.
Hope you’re feeling betterer soonist Fents.
Was the gig Flurence and the Medicine or a Flu & Eddie jamboree?
But what is the new toy in which it has been so rivetingly inserted? I can’t see it mentioned here, and I doubt I will get much sleep tonight if I don’t find out. TIA
😉
It’s a Eversolo DMP – A6 although I’ve renamed it Noodles.