HDD sound (9z4-1)

[CoenP]

Hi,

As we all know the SSD lost its favour since 9z4-1, consequently I've been buying a low power 2.5"spinning (5k2) SATA II disc for my new system for OS and music files.

At first I installed W7 SP1 on my 'old' 160G IDE drive and found a wonderfull sound with Specialmode & Scheme 3 & Straight Cont. & unattendeded.
This sound is however lost when I run XX from the newly installed OS(es) on my new SATA drive. To be shure that the other drive doesn't play a role I disconnected it completely before booting (no BIOS tweaks either).

I've made an effort to be shure that exactly the same configurations are on both HDDs. Even then, the SATA's SQ just won't cut it. It's just to weak, very natural though, but no sparkle of life. It seems that there is more power in the instruments and voices when on the IDE drive. Also the (valued by me) musical flow is just better on the IDE config.

There is still a lot to explore (PSU, BIOS tweaks), but be aware that the type of HDD makes a difference in SQ.

Anybody else ran into this?

regards, Coen

[PeterSt]

Quick and dirty answer : quite some problems with SATAII exist which don't necesserily show in read errors or anything. So I can imagine that it shows in something else, like additional noise ?
Also, electrical the noise from "disks" is general is there for sure, but I wonder whether this was ever explicitly measured for IDE connected disks. Maybe there is a difference !

Northbridge vs. Southbridge stuff ... also a difference (within SATA itself). The latter getting more hot than the former ... thermal noise ... anything ...

[CoenP]

Yep

We dont know if there is more/stronger EC going on with retreiving the data on fast High capacity SATA drives. For shure I expected the reverse to be true. Since most of the XX SQ is related to jitter I figured the a lower power consumption of the 2.5"SATA would yield into a less jitter inducing PSU pattern.
There is a 6 Watt difference at idle and a 10 Watt difference at load between the two (the 3.5 IDE being the least 'Al Gore'). That alone should be accountable for some difference.

So what is it then? PSU loading? NorthBridge loading/optimalisation (mobo was working in IDE mode)?

I will conduct some more experiments to verify/exclude some of the above.

Another possibility is that the signature of the IDE fits my system and taste better. Let's stay at the observation that there is a difference between the two!

regards, Coen

[Calibrator]

As we all know the SSD lost its favour since 9z4-1

Well, I for one don't agree with your assertion.

I have not noticed any significant degradation in perceived sound quality using a SSD drive for the O/S.

In fact there is a significant ergonomic benefit from using a SSD now following the release of the new memory management versions. On the occassions where a quick reboot is needed to recover the straight contiguous memory value available following a clean boot, I can achieve that in 51 seconds!

In other words, from the moment I click on the "Restart" boot option, to the moment when XXHE has fired up again ready for further action, be it a press of the PLAY button or queuing up of another album, 51 seconds has elapsed.

Try that with your spinning discs !

Cheers,

Russ

[BertD]

On the occassions where a quick reboot is needed to recover the straight contiguous memory value available following a clean boot, I can achieve that in 51 seconds!

I can do that in 58 seconds and then XX is already waiting for me to take action...I will tweak the PC even further (disable services to start which I do not need) and then it could be 51 seconds as well. In my system a SSD would be a few seconds quicker but I can wait a bit as I do not like the sound of SSD compared to the spinning HDD.

Bert

[CoenP]

Please note that the SSD thing for 09-z-4-1 was discussed in another thread. I do have no personal experience with a SSD drive for the OS. Booting is no issue, skipping the bootselector quickly I can stay in the ballpark of one minute, including the start of XX (autostart).

I can however confirm that the disc the OS resides on makes an audible and for me relevant difference in SQ.
Today I cross-connected the discs: OS on IDE, music on SATA and OS on SATA, music on IDE. Maybe I exaggerate when I say the OS on SATA, music on IDE sounded like total cr@p, but for shure I didn't like it. The reverse config however played its charms on music albeit sounding a tad 'strange'.

Fortunaltely XX still has the 'copy to XX disc first' button. But that's  for the next round of experiments :-)!

regards, Coen

[PeterSt]

On the occassions where a quick reboot is needed to recover the straight contiguous memory value available following a clean boot

Hey, you sports !
 

I never have to reboot for this, so I guess I am faster !

Although ... I reboot something like in between 10-50 times per day for other reasons. Yes, I'm at 1:04 only so I think it might give me some 11 minutes more working space in a day sometimes. Hmm ...

Btw, that is from the spinning disk. From the SSD it is somewhat more slow, but then there's loads of stuff which have to be initialized from there. Also I have 10 disks connected, and two of them are on eSata which takes longer to "find".
And oh, 10 seconds are lost from the time all goes black to the moment POST comes up. In my case that is.
All I want to say is : this is apples and oranges anyway.

But have your OS disk (partition) formatted with the SMALLEST cluster size ! This opposed to the music disks, which should have the largest. It is here where the speed of Gallaries come into play, because they should be loaded on the OS disk with that small cluster size (remember, Coverart is about small files).
And yes, having the Galleries on an SSD can be significantly faster.

Peter

[Calibrator]

Although ... I reboot something like in between 10-50 times per day for other reasons. Yes, I'm at 1:04 only so I think it might give me some 11 minutes more working space in a day sometimes. Hmm ...

Well Pete, 11 extra minutes a day equates to almost 66 hours over a year. Imagine what you could do in 66 hours. Why, you could probably watch 2 full seasons of F1 championships and still have time left for a MotoGP championship as well

The point I was making is that SSD's are a real tangible benefit from a speed perspective, and I daresay if I was running one of the newer i series CPU's and latest chipset motherboards like a lot of you are, the reboot times would reduce significantly compared to the 'ol clunker I'm happily using still.

FYI, I rarely need to reboot to recover contiguous memory if all i do is play music, album after album. It's when I stop playback for a short while to browse through my music catalogue (Excel spreadsheet based ) or perform other tasks that the memory gets fragmented and necessitates a reboot. I suppose I could reduce the size parameter some more, but I'm happy to endure an occassional reboot.

Cheers,

Russ (the one with alternative viewpoints from the crowd )

[PeterSt]

Haha you down there ...

I wasn't specificaly debating your observations. Only indicating how easy it is to have apples and oranges in this area.
About the F1 season, I guess I must agree. MotoGP I don't watch much. So still some additional time left for e.g. XX.

Thanks Russ,
Peter (now gaining each second on his reboot)

[CoenP]

Hi all,

The boottime has shown to be important in this issue. I found that the boottime of the SATA drive was consistently considerably larger than that of the IDE (1:20 vs 0:48). cpu load was consistently higher too.

Also the mobo apparently has two kinds of SATA II controllers: two ports on the NM10 chipset and two ports on the PCI-e IDE/SATA-II controller. It turned out that both drives where plugged into the PCI-e controller ports. Replugging made for some difference but not in boot times.

The latter changed when I put the SATA drive in AHCI mode. Boottime was now 0:46, faster that the IDE. SQ suffered however. Reconfiguring the drive for IDE mode kept the fast boottime with much better SQ. Also cpu load is comparable to the IDE situation.
Something probably did not go well at the install of the memory drivers in win7.

There still is a SQ difference between the drives though. The SATA drive sound seems to be in desperate need of seasoning, all stays a little too dull and polite.

Since my win7 install won't launch XX from the taskbar anymore (see new topic in support threads), I've been playing with XP again. After some tweaks SQ is hard to fault and out of the box much better than Win7 SP1.
It occurred to me that a lot of recommended OS tweaks apply to XP, but not to win7. The latter only sounds good in exactly the setup of my signature.

Furthermore XP does NOT sound good unattended no matter what configuration. Can we have the stop-services back for attended mode?

regards, Coen

[PeterSt]

Thank you for all your feedback Coen.

Can we have the stop-services back for attended mode?

Stupid question maybe, but did something change regarding this ?

After some tweaks SQ is hard to fault and out of the box much better than Win7 SP1

I sure believe you. But at this moment it is hard to believe this will be an absolute measure. Please think "filtering" again; If all is right you will find Vista better again. Now that you (or anyone) must try it, but if it is pereceived as better, I'm fairly sure you have to do some other things in your system.

To be honest *and* to be clear : I never listen to XP anymore, so I actually can't tell. But I have some ideas about it ...

Peter


PS: I sure don't like the idea of SATA influencing the sound. This may just as well count for everybody, but at least for you it seems to be in the equation. Remember ... filters ...

[CoenP]

But at this moment it is hard to believe this will be an absolute measure

Shure! I was only surprised that it all worked so well for good old XP, even on SATA. At this moment, Win 7 optimised has the edge though (on my IDE disc).

There is still a lot of work to do!

regards, Coen

[CoenP]

Hi all,

I'm reviving this thread because of a new learning on the HDD sound topic.

My PC-etised music collection has grown beyond my SATA drive capabilities, so I bought a new one. To leave for some growthpotential I chose a 2T 3.5" sata spinpoint. When formatting I remembered someone mentioning on this forum to choose a large cluster size for rapid access to the music data. So I did choose 64k size and transferred all my music to this partition. Everything played fine for a while, but an annoyance with the sound grew over time.
This was not a good sign.

Meawhile I installed 9z5 and played around with settings to adress the annoynce, unfortunately to no avail. When I started to blame the drive again I remembered the non standard clustersize. As an experiment I made a new standard (4K) partition and listened closely for differences in sound. A you would have guessed by now the differences were quite audible in the sense that they both leave a different impression of the music (sometimes I had to make shure I was playing the same track, could have been late night fatigue ). Fortunately with the 4k clustersize my annoyance was gone and I'm again enjoying the music.

Does anybody have similar or contradictory experiences? Maybe this is just a thing of my setup...

regards, Coen   

[PeterSt]

No experiences. I will think about it at setting up a new disk though.
Yes, it was me telling about that cluster size.

... And I sure can imagine that this matters ...

Thanks !
Peter

[PeterSt]

In fact there is a significant ergonomic benefit from using a SSD now following the release of the new memory management versions. On the occassions where a quick reboot is needed to recover the straight contiguous memory value available following a clean boot, I can achieve that in 51 seconds!

In other words, from the moment I click on the "Restart" boot option, to the moment when XXHE has fired up again ready for further action, be it a press of the PLAY button or queuing up of another album, 51 seconds has elapsed.

Try that with your spinning discs !

Oh, I just noticed 51 seconds as well. On a spinning disk that is. Haha.
But this is on my W7/SP1-RC setup for movies which is fairly lean. It still incorporates detecting all the HDDs and stuff from bridges from all wind directions, so it can be faster. Btw, same PC as the over 1 minute I reported earlier.

On some side note : the most can be gained on the shut-down procedure, I think.


PS : After writing this, I noticed a shutdown time of 2 seconds (I just rebooted again). This was with a fully startup and now quiet system. The above 51 seconds though, had a shutdown time of 21 seconds. So, 19 seconds difference only because of that (and which should lead to the possibility of 51-19 = 32 seconds). I didn't try that because I rebooted into another OS, and I feel I have rebooted enough already for the day.