I agree with Steve... an SSD is not needed for a music drive. I like the Seagate FireCuda hybrid drive, but a standard hard drive will work fine.
I have always used internal hard drives for my DJ computers, but I always had two hard drives in my computers... one for the OS and software, and a larger capacity drive for data (music). That way, upgrading was a matter of popping out the data drive and replacing it with a new one. Then I copy everything to the new drive from my server, or from a portable drive I do backups with.
My biggest problem is having too many computers with a copy of my music library, and keeping them all in sync... takes too much time, all the computers must be powered on, and it isn’t any fun. A portable hard drive does solve that problem, so perhaps it’s the smarter choice.
Recently I tried something new, which I intend to use in my next mobile system. I have dual computers in both of my mobile systems. In my large system, I have two Nano computers... one serves as a backup computer, but also runs lights and video if necessary. The thing I wanted to do was SHARE a music library between the two computers, but you can’t really do that with a Portable USB Drive plugged into one of the two computers. You CAN map the drive from one computer to another, but in the event of a computer crash, you’d have to physically switch the portable drive to the working backup, then remap it as a local drive, which would take a few minutes. I want to share the drive live. There are a couple of options. You could use a router with a built-in USB drive, but my experience with that method is that they tend be SLOW and to lose connectivity, which is NOT good if you’re playing music from it. I carry such a router, but I only set it up if I need to have Internet connectivity. You could use a USB switch, that allows you to toggle a USB device between two computers with the push of a button. I have such a switch and it works well, but still only one computer can access the data at a time. The option I chose is to use a third Nano computer as a NAS. I use FreeNas, which is a derivative of FreeBSD. It’s like having a portable drive, but it’s connected to the network, so you can connect as many computers to it at the same time as you’d like. I have a third backup computer (a laptop) that I just plug into another port on the Ethernet switch inside my rack, and it can use the same NAS. The NAS, however, becomes a new single point of failure, just like a portable hard drive, so you’d have to carry a spare. However, you could keep the spare connected to the switch, and only turn it on if the main NAS crashed.
My NAS has an m.2 drive where the OS is loaded, and a 2.5” 3TB FireCuda drive as the data drive. It’s FAST... seems faster than a 7200RPM 3.5” Hard drive, but I’ve never done any actual benchmarking to verify that. Cost of a NAS is gonna be related to the computer you get. You don’t need one with a lot of horsepower though, so a brand new Nano PC could be had for around $150, and they are fanless, so not a lot of mechanical parts to break. Add the cost of a good hard drive ($100 for 2TB) and you’ve got a nice NAS. The software is free.
Not sure if any of this is germane, but perhaps it’s food for thought.
