192b87db

PID: SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
On Sun, 03 Jun 2018 15:44:24 +0100, D.M. Procida wrote:

> Martin Gregorie  wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 03 Jun 2018 13:17:17 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>> > On 03/06/18 12:43, D.M. Procida wrote:
>> >> For a Pi running Volumio (a music player), what would be better for
>> >> storage, a large USB flash drive (or multiple drives) or a hard disk
>> >> drive?
>> >>
>> >> How do they compare in speed, for example?
>> >
>> > speed is not an issue frankly
>> >
>> > HDD still more storage for yer dollar And a little more power
>> > consumption
>> >
>> Amplifying: even with 4 channel surround-sound and uncompressed WAV,
>> the audio data rate is 2.8 Mb/s (assuming CD-quality - 44.1 KHz sample
>> rate, 16 bits per sample for each channel). In computing terms that is
>> only 0.35 MB/s - miniscule compared with the speed of SD cards (12.5
>> MB/s min), USB2.0 (35 MB/S for USB2) or SATA SSD or hard drives (150
>> MB/s min).
>
> Granted, an SD card looks like it should be able to outperform any
> demands made of it by a music player, but in practice, having the music
> files stored on the SD card (that the Pi booted from) didn't work well
> at all.
>
> I don't know why, but it struggled to keep it playing smoothly.
>
Some classes of card give poor performance, though that may well be
related to fragmentation. Don't forget that SD cards were designed for
large reads and writes (still images, videos...) and not for the type of
random access needed for good Linux filing system performance, and this
is probably exaggerated by the RPi's relatively small RAM, which reduces
its ability to cache data. But, if it doesn't work for you, fair enough.

Bear mind that the USB and Ethernet are relatively slow on an RPi because
all connect through the same USB hub, though if streamed output doesn't
go near these connections this may not be a problem, i.e. you're using
HDMI or a 3rd party DAC on an expansion card, this should not be a
problem.

If you have a USB-SD card reader it may be worth moving some music onto
another SD card and, connecting it via the card reader to see if that
also stutters. If it does not, then using a second SD card becomes a
possibility to compare with SSD  and HDD solutions or simply keeping the
music files on a house server / NAS box (if you have one) on cost
grounds.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05