Would an SSD be a bad choice for a music collection?

Hardware Hub
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I have a horrifically large music collection, and I’ve always used HDDs in my builds specifically for that collection because it’s north of 800gb of small files and while I don’t rearrange it massively every single day, there is the occasional cleaning or additions. the “14gb a day for 30 years” or whatever the standard marketing was when I last checked is probably rubbish, but I may not be up on the latest standards.

Tl;dr: lots of small files, occasional medium/large deletions or additions, not to mention the initial filling of the drive to begin with, is it going to be dangerous to rely on an SSD for this task?

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Sounds like a typical database workload to me.

Searching for files on and SSD vs HDD alone is worth the investment

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Ssds generally only wear from writes, and if you’re only adding and not deleting then add will last longer than hdd as you’d have to write to the entire drive multiple times before you’d see a deac cell

That said you can focus on capacity and endurance rather than iops and sequential speed

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(post deleted by author)

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“I vow to backup all my Data! Can I get an Amen?”

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thanks all. Unfortunate I’ve done a bit of pcpartpicker’ing and the cheapest Crucial [I’ve gone with them before as the non-Samsung option, no problems] 2tb SSD is $173, which is a bit more than the WD Black 2tb HDD for $80 a pop, so I think that might have to be scrapped as an option for an upcoming build, GPU/CPU prices being what they are/will be early in '23.

That being said, another thing I found was that Crucial 2tb m.2’s are currently $123. Does having multiple m.2’s affect anything such as GPU performance?

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Depends on the motherboard and CPU
Generally you’re fine at 8x on GPU even top end ones

On amds x570 series with a CPU that has 24 lanes

You get 16 for gpu 4 dedicated for m.2 and 4 to chipset to share with io

So OS for dedicated m.2
And then up to 2 more at 4x and your GPU will still be fine

I think Intel generally has fewer on 10th gen and older than amd but generally you’ll be fine

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Unless there is some reason not to wait a couple weeks there should be some sort of deal to be had for Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Sadly, the usual sites I visit that would list all of the deals for those and Singles Day (11.11, cheap stuff on AliExpress) aren’t running lists this year.

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Most consumer SSDs have a Total Drive Writes number of 400TB per 1TB of space on them. Meaning it should still work if you decided to fill the drive up completely every day for a year, so you’ll be fine with an SSD (they’re getting cheap too). Just recommend having a second backup copy though, just incase.

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Not sure what your music collection is made of, but mp3 files (likely the smallest music format file format) should have a few megabytes each.
For the topic of this discussion I would consider these large files, not small files.
Reading/copying these files in total will be generally fast (high bandwidth) both with HDDs and SSDs.
What is slow is reading, managing the metadata for 800GB worth of mp3 files (200-300k files). How are you doing that?

I use a DLNA server that can be accessed over the network by most of my devices. I ensure that that service has enough memory and that its cache files live on fast SSDs.

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How must music do you need, 1tb should be enough for evertyone.

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my own music collection is about 1.5TB, and I expect it to eventually exceed 2TB.
My solution was to put the music collection on a NAS. If you can afford it, solid state is fine for this except for one problem. If you delete files lots when the drive is 90%+ full, you’re basically wearing out the drive more than 10x faster than it would otherwise be. For this reason, it’s not an ideal use case.
If you avoid leaving the drive more than 70~80% full, though, it shouldn’t be much of a problem, because the write volume isn’t that much to begin with.
Also, SSDs tend to not retain data for years offline like HDDs do. You can get bitrot creeping in just from being off for a month or two after enough write wear. It’s worth keeping a backup of your full music collection on a HDD even if you mostly use a SSD for easy listening.

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FLAC is a good way to increase file size. Sure, when you can not distinguish between MP3 and FLAC, save yourself 90% of space, but some got good ears.

And then there is studio/archival work: DSD files

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…that being said, I’d say that people should at least move to AAC from MP3 these days.

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My music collections anonys me and its only 16G.

Its harder to make a phone play music off my device now

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you should never move from a lossy format, especially to another. There is literally no benefit to converting your MP3s to AACs.
I don’t think AAC is that much better than MP3 either. There’s no reason to not just get things in FLAC to begin with if you care about quality, and if you don’t, 320k mp3s are more than adequate, and afaict keeps up with AAC well at <320kbps bitrates.

A better thing to do would keep FLACs of the original, uncompressed source where possible, and otherwise leave the format alone, except to convert flacs down to MP3 for space-constrained devices as needed, ofc keeping the original FLAC in place for the future.

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Usually not wrong with SSDs for your purpose.

What’s a large deletion or addition? And how often is occasional?

You should still have a backup of your files regardless of media - future is hard to predict and stuff always breaks when you least expect it to.

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I wasn’t referring to transcoding but if you want a lossy format AAC (LC) is still better than MP3. I don’t think I’ve seen any serious tests that favours MP3 over AAC if you use a decent encoder (Apple’s AAC encoder and/or possibly Exhale/FhG).

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