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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: Inferior sound from USB external drive?

I am assuming that the existing hard drive on your old computer is small. You may well have problems with the BIOS that limit your use of the new hard drive. These may possibly even create the impression that the entire storage capacity is usable, leading to potential future data corruption when exceeding the actual limit. (It's been a few years since I investigated this situation, so I don't recall the details. But I know there's are real problems with some older gear and there are various size thresholds that, when crossed, can create problems. These may include drive size and volume size.)

Before loading any good files on your new drive, I would do some serious testing. First, I would do a full format, not a quick format. Second, if this succeeds, I would put lots of large files on the drive, enough to run out of space and verify that these write correctly without corruption. If these tests pass, then I would reformat the drive and start over. Alternatively, I would research the situation thoroughly, as there may be information about your specific configuration available or there may be quick diagnostic tests you can run to see what will happens.

In the end, I junked my machine. I even had to pay to junk it. :-( I didn't feel too bad, as the machine was truly ancient, having started out running Windows 98.

Another older Windows XP from 2001 had a hard drive failure and I replaced the hard drive with a much larger disk. It turned out that the BIOS for this machine would not support a single volume the size of the new drive, so I had to format two volumes. This machine still runs Windows XP, but ever slower due to application bloat. However, I have yet to get it to run a modern Linux distro. There seems to be a graphics driver problem...

Be prepared to junk your old machine and definitely be pleasantly surprised if you can get it to work.



Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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