Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles

If you thought a $2,500 audiophile-focused ethernet switch was strange, then you'll also be amused with this NVMe SSD designed specifically for audiophiles. Last known to be in the sampling phase, the new device was posted to the Audiophilestyle forums. Supposedly, the drive can increase audio quality and give you real 3D sound along with an experience that only comes from vinyl recordings, but don't look for this drive on our list of Best SSDs any time soon — its impact on audio quality is questionable, to say the least.

The developer claims to have designed and built the device from the ground up in close collaboration with an unnamed SSD controller manufacturer. The pictured device has a Realtek SSD controller, a company better known for its sound processors even though it began making SSD controllers a few years ago. 

The drive comes with 1TB of 3D TLC flash, but it only has 333GB of usable storage capacity. That's because the SSD runs in pseudo-SLC (pSLC) mode, which trades off usable capacity in favor of performance and endurance. Notably, there are already SSDs on the market that use pSLC modes for some tasks. The maker claims that using this mode increases sound quality, outperforming standard TLC mode:

"The sound quality is just our test experience, this test is performed under the same standard product (PCB, external power jack, crystal oscillator, capacitors, etc. have not been modified)

TLC mode: It sounds like background music, no features and powerless, everything is flattened, lacks extension and density.

pSLC mode: There is a special natural feeling, it becomes more smooth and calm, the thickness is slightly increased, and overall it is more resistant to hearing but still slightly dry."

As for the rest of the drive's features, it is specced out with a Crystek CCHD-957 Femto clock oscillator, two Audionote Kaisei 220uf capacitors, an external 5V DC power input, an eight-layer PCB with 2oz of copper, Milspec PCB stiffness, 300% grounding area, 5u gold plated connectors, and a CNCed copper heatsink.

Additionally, the maker claims this SSD is powered by an external power source (power doesn't come from the motherboard) to enhance sound quality further. You can see the power jack in the lower-left corner of the device.

Drives were apparently sampled to several forum members, many of whom later "lost contact" with the maker after receiving the product. However, one sampler did leave a bit of feedback about the device, saying, "Still trying the drive out, just received 2 days ago. Initial impressions are positive, this is easy/pleasant to live with as OS boot drive, unlike the Samsung 970 Evo plus NVME."

Thumbing through the forum thread, it appears this experience is based on the users' subjective measure, though, meaning there are no actual measurements of sound quality. That's par for the course for many insanely-priced devices for audiophiles, though.

Honestly, we highly doubt the fancy gizmo provides any additional sound enhancements over a "standard SSD." Regardless of the tech surrounding the chips, at their most basic level, SSDs store data in binary 1s and 0s, meaning that you can only have 1s and 0s of data. Simply put, adding extra gadgets or power isolation to an SSD can't change those 1s or 0s into something better, and any rarely encountered errors are immediately corrected through various types of error-correcting code.

If anything, the SSD should be very fast simply due to the nature of pSLC, and have crazy overkill power conditioning. Besides that, it's hard to believe that it would provide a better audio experience. That's because SSDs are incapable of altering audio quality — that's all done by the audio processing unit on your computer.