Quiet external hard drive for audio
I'm thinking of turning my iBook into an audiophile "jukebox", for high-end headphone use mainly.
I wanted to rip all (or most at least) of my CD's to AIFF (or FLAC, possibly?) to disk, and so I was looking at FW hard drive solutions...
Here are my criteria:
1. Silent, or nearly so. My headphones are open-backed (Sennheiser HD600) so they let through all surrounding noise.
2. I'd think I would need at least 120-160 gigs, more would be nice... Entire CD's ripped to AIFF take up quite a bit of space. With FLAC I could fit twice the amount, but from what I've seen so far, support seems to be a bit flakey... I've had some issues getting XMMS with the FLAC plugin in Fink to work smoothly, although it does work. Do correct me if I'm wrong, I'd gladly use FLAC if the support is there. It would be nice if Apple offered lossless compression (FLAC, Monkey's Audio) for iTunes.... I really would prefer to use iTunes (especially for organizing playlists), so I think I'm stuck with AIFF.
The alternative solution I was considering was to get an external FW enclosure and insert my own drive(s) in there. If I went this way, I'd probably go for one with at least 2 slots for expandability... but this would definitely result in extra bulk.
Suggestions please! Thanks in advance.
I wanted to rip all (or most at least) of my CD's to AIFF (or FLAC, possibly?) to disk, and so I was looking at FW hard drive solutions...
Here are my criteria:
1. Silent, or nearly so. My headphones are open-backed (Sennheiser HD600) so they let through all surrounding noise.
2. I'd think I would need at least 120-160 gigs, more would be nice... Entire CD's ripped to AIFF take up quite a bit of space. With FLAC I could fit twice the amount, but from what I've seen so far, support seems to be a bit flakey... I've had some issues getting XMMS with the FLAC plugin in Fink to work smoothly, although it does work. Do correct me if I'm wrong, I'd gladly use FLAC if the support is there. It would be nice if Apple offered lossless compression (FLAC, Monkey's Audio) for iTunes.... I really would prefer to use iTunes (especially for organizing playlists), so I think I'm stuck with AIFF.
The alternative solution I was considering was to get an external FW enclosure and insert my own drive(s) in there. If I went this way, I'd probably go for one with at least 2 slots for expandability... but this would definitely result in extra bulk.
Suggestions please! Thanks in advance.
Comments
Originally posted by fiddler
I wanted to rip all (or most at least) of my CD's to AIFF (or FLAC, possibly?) to disk, and so I was looking at FW hard drive solutions...
1) If you are listening the files on your iBook, you can as well rip to 192KBit AAC. Don't let anyone tell you they can tell the difference. The D/A circuitry in Notebooks is good, but not good enough for audiophiles. The slight quality difference between AAC and any losless format will be lost along the way.
2) If you really need more than 80GB space (this is the largest 2.5"), buy a 3.5" HD. 3.5" HDs are usually less noisy than 2.5" - esp. some month down the road. But don't forget - your iBook HD will be spinning too.
3) buy the HD with the slowest rpm you can get (5400 I guess), because latency does not matter for playing music and slower HDs are much more silent.
Yes, the D/A sucks on an iBook which is why I'm currently using an M-Audio Sonica (modded output caps) and plans on upgrading the DAC to something even nicer, using the Sonica as the digital output.
There seems to be quite a few fanless enclosures out there for 3.5" HDD's for pretty cheap, do the quality of these devices vary a lot?
http://www.byteccusa.com/product/enclosure/index.htm
Was looking at something like that, on the cheaper side of things.
How are Maxtor and Western Digital in terms of noise?
Originally posted by fiddler
There seems to be quite a few fanless enclosures out there for 3.5" HDD's for pretty cheap, do the quality of these devices vary a lot?
http://www.byteccusa.com/product/enclosure/index.htm
Was looking at something like that, on the cheaper side of things.
How are Maxtor and Western Digital in terms of noise?
I don't recommend fanless enclosures for high-rev drives (7200 RPM) nor for drives that are being read/wrote heavily (boot drives) but for music playback it shouldn't really be a problem. It also depends on the drive and how warm it is under general use.
Regardless of manufacturer you need to locate drives that use Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) motors. AFAIK all major drive manufacturers offer drives with FDBs. It helps lessen noise greatly. My Western Digital 7200 RPM, sans FDB, is much louder then my 10K RPM Raptor drive with FDB.
Check StorageReview.com for heat/noise benches on many current drives. Their forums are also a great place for help.