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The AVERAGE person does not need a sound card in 2013. Even the average gamer probably does not. I spend many hours a day in front of my computer listening to higher than average quality music on my PC, with much better than average quality speakers and headphones. For me, there is no question...

OK, so my trusty old Sondigo Inferno sound card pulled a croaker on me (sounds like just a bad cap but it's an old PCI card and probably won't have a home in my next PC anyway), made me sad but also meant I got to go shopping. So I came home with a shiny new Essence STX, which is very pretty...

The problem is that Bluetooth audio is fairly heavily compressed, so regardless of the quality of the output device the best you can reasonably expect in terms of fidelity is not that great. I have never heard Bluetooth headphones that made me happy.

The end result of a proper rip will certainly be more accurate than what makes it out of almost any standalone CD player during playback, as the PC can take as many retries as it needs to get it right without being constrained by the need to maintain a steady output stream. As mentioned above...

Things that get hot enough to smoke tend to change color, there should be a visible mark maybe on the back of the board.

Mine generally stays at 44.1 as CD Audio is the most critical listening that I do most of the time. On the odd occasion that I listen to some higher resolution music I manually reset it to match the source, and I definetly notice the lack of detail in CD Audio when I forget to switch it back...

MATE since they broke GNOME

What is the intended usage? If its just to store media, then SSD caching isn't necessary, nor is a 7200 RPM drive. All 7200 drives will be louder than their slower spinning counterparts so if quiet is the primary goal they're probably best avoided, and all modern 5400 RPM drives are more than...

Well in part I'd guess its precisely because they are the leading manufacturer of drives that they'd have the most RMAs. NewEgg reviews aren't a great indicator either as people are far more likely to report a problem than they are the absence of problems, people are just bitchy that way...

The main reason you want your SSD running AHCI is for TRIM support, without which your drives performance will tend to decrease over time. Also, you gain command queueing which will help performance during heavy I/O activity.

If your SSD failed during a filesystem format it was probably broken anyway.

There is no need for this.

I've never tried to usb install XP, I'd just burn it to a DVD. Sounds like your USB is running very, very slow for whatever reason though, and I wouldn't be surprised if whatever is causing that also caused some kind of other problem during install. Hope it works out for you.

It's possible to slipstream the drivers onto an install CD. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/72185-sata-drivers-slipstream-into-windows-xp-cd.html

Yes, the cabling spec hasn't changed since SATA was introduced.

35MBps is on the high end of what you can expect from USB 2.0. I don't think I've ever seen over 38.

I just use a generic(ish) MediaGate WMC Remote under XBMC/Linux. It's alot smoother and less clunky than a mouse/keyboard, unless you're using your HTPC for web browsing and other non HT tasks you really don't need a mouse or keyboard.

Lots of keyboards now have media control buttons on them, including volume controls. Just a thought.

+1 on this. There is no difference in cabling spec between the 3 revisions of SATA. The requirements are exactly the same for each of them. Any cable that meets the SATA specification will be able to handle all 3 modes equally well.

You don't need a monster PC to serve files from. An 8 core is insanely overkill for this job, for almost every job actually. File serving could be done just as well by an i3 or low power athlon, maybe even an Atom. 2 or 4GB of RAM and low power hard drives, it shouldn't really use much power...

LTO5 is 1.5TB native (uncompressed) capacity, LTO4 is 800GB and LTO3 is 400GB. Older generation drives can be had much cheaper, I personally use LTO3.

I think heat and crappy power sometimes play a part also. In general desktop drives in enclosures have a substantially rougher life than those mounted internally. Best bet is to get drive and enclosure seperately, and buy a quality enclosure maybe with some kind of active cooling (fan).

If the NAS is limited in throughput, whether due to it's network interface, or it's onboard processor's ability to calculate parity (RAID5) there is nothing that will make it faster, that's just how fast it goes. I haven't encountered many NAS boxes that could perform much better than what you...

Yeah try CoreAVC, it's going to be borderline I think but it should be able to do 720p if nothing else is hitting on the CPU.

It will function essentially the same as an internal SATA drive, so I don't see why you shouldn't be able to boot off it.

No, just make sure all the drives are accessible to Linux. You won't screw up the array by mdadm not being able to put the array together, just don't recreate it if you encounter errors. As for the boot drive, you'll probably want that on the first SATA port just for the sake of consistency...

Don't worry about it.

Yes that is the correct cable. Then you'll set your software to output to your onboard audios digital output.

The subwoofer output should be under a crossover of some kind, and suitable to drive a subwoofer directly.

I would think you could just leave it set to Ext Stereo or whatever as it should only apply that setting to stereo signals, 5.1 or 7.1 would be handled normally (direct mapping). Might be a little more convenient that way, worth trying out anyhow.

I will come out and say that based on personal experience, hard drives are generally less reliable than they were 10 or 20 years ago. Not sure why, but they just seem to fail more than ever. I think this is common among most consumer electronics these days and is a direct result of much lower...

Real world gains are minimal or non existant. But if you've already got the pair of drives and have the technical knowhow to make it work, why not? Just don't expect miracles, a single modern SSD is pretty bloody fast for a single user.

I've never used FlexRAID but $50 seems like a pretty good deal to me for what it does. It's funny how the price/value of software has declined so rapidly in recent years. In the 90s software like that would have cost at least 10x this much.

The partition structure of the drive shouldn't have anything to do with the interface, they're a couple of layers apart. The enclosure could just be faulty, or it's power supply, or the USB cable.

If it's already 16 bit, and your target is 16 bit also, there is no dithering to be done. Uncheck it to be sure I guess, but there's no reason it should do anything in this case.

Try another machine, you could be having some kind of USB problem, maybe power related.

I've decided alot more stuff can go to tape over the past months, but I'm feeling the pinch now for sure and prices are getting a little more reasonable, but I'm still waiting yes.

I wouldn't expect a device to provide superior audio simply based on it being newer. We've had the technology for high quality audio in portable devices for a long time now, it's just a matter of how much priority is given to it by the manufacturer. In the case of the iPod, audio is the...

It really depends what needs to be done I guess. I could see use in something like this for one time onsite archival of large datasets, especially if the customer didn't want the data leaving the premesis. I've had requests like that before, but as my LTO setup is far from portable I've had to...

You could use a USB GbE adapter and make a private network then? The tape server wouldn't be running Windows so malware shouldn't be a problem, and you could even wipe the array between jobs to ensure you're not spreading disease.