![]() ![]() ![]() You could spend £200-300 on a USB SSD drive of a decent size or just buy half a dozen USB sticks with 128-256GB and just duplicate the contents and use them on multiple devices or as spares/backups. A good quality SSD drive from Samsung, Western Digital, Seagate etc will have a wear allocation or wear buffer in the factory usually around 10-20% of capacity so as blocks of memory are worn and fail you slowly allocate in to the wear buffer to avoid reducing total capacity and to extend serviceable lifespan. Ordinarily a decent quality SSD will have a better disk controller than a basic USB stick which is basically built to a price to be written to a lower number of times and to almost certainly fail sooner than a SATA or PCIe based SSD drive. You’re unlikely to wear a drive out even if you really try, one example where you could would be something like a time shift buffer for video on a set top box or smart tv where the write cycles will be fairly high especially if the drive is a lower capacity. There’s a few main things to consider with flash storage, the interface speed, which is usually USB for removable devices, the read/write speeds usually measured/quoted in MB or Mb per second and if made available in the product specifications, the wear cycles which is how many times an addressable/writable block of memory can be written to before it fails and is marked as worn. Things like ROON RAAT do similar by converting to PCM before sending the audio data to the Roon Endpoint as one example.įlash storage technology differs between devices and there are different types of flash. It’s worth noting here that playback of formats like FLAC requires them to be converted back to a PCM bitstream for the DAC to be able to process them and output an analogue signal, it’s not going to process the FLAC/ALAC/MPx data hence the assumption that a WAV file is better as it’s not having to be converted by the DAC for playback. MQA is a means to overcome some of those bandwidth/streaming constraints but is not supported by Naim streamers. Most streaming services will use FLAC or a lossy format due to bandwidth savings. If you’re ripping your own CD’s for local playback and have a decent enough database to manage metadata then WAVE files are going to give you the best overall format for archive purposes and will minimise any processing overheads during playback. A WAVE file is just Linear PCM data without any means or mechanism for compression but has only basic metadata support and is a larger file size compared to other formats including FLAC. FLAC has richer metadata support and is able to be compressed at various levels of complexity including no compression at all. Both have strengths and weaknesses, if you’re taking a purist approach and focusing on minimising the data flow and conversion then a WAVE file is the same as the source data on the CD and the music itself would almost certainly have been produced, recorded and mastered as PCM data and only later on have been converted to other formats including FLAC. In the real world, namely your home, I doubt you’ll hear a difference between the two formats given the same source and resolution. ![]()
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