Music sounds better playing through SSD than USB on the same device?
SSD or USB disc external i guess you talk?
Placebo for me as music is played from memoryā¦
Audirvana load the music into memory from where it is from
then, play itā¦
Loading faster from a SSD? important? song in 16/44
are loaded into memory in a secondā¦ 24-96 in 3 seconds maybe??
Loaded in Memory, then played
Computer on SSD yes,
External for music on SSD, pay if you want, no gain for me.
Again now, maybe 5to SSD or like are really cheap i donāt know, and wonāt check 
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If it consistently sounds sufficiently better to you to make it worth whatever additional cost there is, then certainly do what you like. Youāre the one listening and the only one who has to be satisfied. 
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Too ambiguous of a questionā¦ There are too many variables and influences at play to come to a consensus about thisā¦ Understanding the synergy between memory throughput/band-width, latency, system resources like available RAM, CPU capability and electro-mechanical noise potentials and how these factors collectively influence the digital-audio signal sent-to and ultimately output-by your DAC, will help make the best decision for your playback scenario.
@waves
Here I use a 2TB SSD via USB.
Itās almost full.
In October 2024, my wife and daughter were in the US and brought me a 5TB external hard drive.
Thatās probably what Iāll use, but I also donāt think it will have any impact on the sound quality.
Theyāll be in New York in September; weāll see what SSD prices are like.
It depends. If the music output is also on a USB connection, probably.
Let me clarify something I wasnāt clear on, Iām running Audirvana through a PC with USB out to DAC and a USB jump drive used to play the files from.
Out of curiosity, I copied several .dsd files to the hard drive (SSD) of the PC and switched back and forth between the drives. I believe the files played through the SSD sound marginally ābetterā. If anyone is curious/ambitious and is willing to try it, let me know your impressions.
To be clear: do you mean a USB-stick (flash drive) when you mention a āUSB jump driveā ?. If so, a flash drive can be notably slow (for dsd files this could be especially important).
Better try with an external USB hard drive (or SSD). Also connect the USB drive to a USB port on a different USB group than your DAC is connected to.
EDIT:
In the past I compared various hi-res (flac) and dsd files. I copied them to my NAS, the internal SSD of my PC (NUC) and to a external USB SSD (connected to the NUC). The NUC is connected to an external DAC via USB.
I could not reliably hear any difference between all of them.
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There are all sorts of ways this could affect your sound that wouldnāt apply to others, so I donāt know that anyone elseās results would be enlightening for you. For example, electrical activity from your jump drive could be in play, where it might not for me, since I use local streaming over UPnP with optical Ethernet, which electrically isolates the DAC from the PC. No way of telling with the different systems each of us has.
As @AndyLubke alludesā¦ The transfer rate of the USB stick makes the difference in comparison to the speed of the SSD drive:
What are the USB types?
The following transfer rates are possible: Theoretical Practical USB 2.0 Sticks: 480 Mbit/s (=60 MB/s) ~ 40 MB/s USB 3.0 (3.2 Gen 1 bzw. 3.1 Gen 1) Sticks: 5 Gbit/s (=625 MB/s) ~ 450 MB/s USB 3.1 (3.2 Gen 2 bzw. 3.1 Gen 2x1) Sticks: 10 Gbit/s (=1250 MB/s) ~ 1000 MB/s USB 3.2 (3.2 Gen 2x2) Sticks: 20 Gbit/s (=2500 MB/s) ~ 1.900 MB/s USB 4 (Gen 3x2 - still in development): 40 Gbit/s (=5000 MB/s) ~ 3.800 MB/s The USB-A connector
(the current standard connector) is designed to transfer a maximum of 10 Gbit/s due to its design. For USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 and USB 4, the new torsion-proof Type-C connector
is required, as it couples two pairs of wires at 10 Gbps each.
Fastest USB flash drive benchmark test 2025
Ground differential noise is not a factor to be concerned with, when implementing a USB stick storage device for playback, as the computer is the common ground plane.
It depends on the way a PC is build if the (electrical) noise generated on one USB port influences the other USB ports. It is often the case though. So in your case having your files stored on a SSD, which is probably better decoupled from the USB interface within your PC, leads to less electrical noise on the USB connection, which in turn influences the DAC stage. And you hear that.
It further depends on the USB interface of your DAC how well it is capable to keep out the noise incoming in the electrical signal. As a rule, more expensive DACs are better isolated, but it varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and it even varies within the lineup of a manufacturer. The older the DAC, the more prone to noise in most cases.
So, your finding can be replicated, but you cannot generalise it.
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I agreeā¦
This is true if the SSD is an internal SATA drive or internal M.2 driveā¦ If it is an external SSD on the USB bus controller, a bus-powered SSD box would be exposed to external noise influences along the length of the interconnect that will have impact on the digital-audio signal and if externally powered, would be subject to those same influences and ground-differential noise. USB 3.0 and 3.1 are the best choice for USB transmission, because the power-lines are separated from the data-lines and signaling-lines in USB 3.0 interface/cable protocol.
I recommend avoiding external USB bus-powered SSD boxes, because of the noise created by the spurious nature of the power demands. It is easy to isolate the USB interface of any given computer these daysā¦ I use an iFi Defender+ to isolate my external SSD from the USB bus on my Mac Studio and take great care in mitigating noise in the signal powering the drive.
Which SSD is the best? Here are detailed SSD speed performance tests of the new 4th generation PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs, as well as the slower PCIe 3.0. The maximum speed for PCIe 4.0 x4 is 64 Gbps. Current cards currently achieve around 7,000 MB/s and the PCIe 3.0 x4 around 3,500 MB/s (measured with CrystalDiskMark). SSDs with the new Phison E18 controller can achieve very high speeds, making them suitable as additional storage for PlayStation 5 gaming.
SSDs that are compatible with PlayStation 5 are marked āPS5 compatibleā.
M2 SSD Benchmark & Performance Test 2025
I donāt recommend storing the music Library on the System drive.
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