Recommended Disk Speeds for HQ audio

Legacy versions MacOS
1

I have a question related to the necessary performance of external disks to stream, HQ audio files from.

As a precursor, I think I am right that intrinsically:

  • RBDC is 176kB/s
    SACD is 711kB/s
    96/24 is 576k/s
    172/24 is 1,056Bb/s
    QUadDSD is 2,844kB/s

So, this seems to suggest that some of the HQ formats can be demanding on disk performance, e.g. QuadDSD.

Assuming my calculations are correct.

I have just tested my Samsung 1TB SSD and it reports about 40MB/s (vs. my internal SSD at 2500MB/s), and I wondered what people thought about that ‘raw’ disk performance (which appears adequate) and whether that remains adequate in the real world?

2

Hello–

I use a NAS for all my music storage, and though the disks are meant to run 24/7, they are not the speediest at 5400 RPM. I have never experienced any issues whatsoever during playback. I believe these speeds are far more than adequate; but even so, Audirvana buffers the stream quite well.