Let's Talk SSD's inside the Zen NG (Zenith)

[Bill Allen]

Long time owner of Zen Mini MkIII & Phoenix USB, awaiting the arrival of my new Zen NG w/SPDIF Card. (No internal storage drives fitted)

I would like to install my own SSD storage but the website does not clearly explain the location & arrangement of the internal SDD's. I understand there are 3- SSD ports inside the Zen NG series, one NVMe PCIe for the OS, another internal NVMe PCIe for storage (8GB max), and an external accessible M.2 NVMe (8GB max).

The install guide for the external M.2 slot clearly shows a 22mm x 80mm sized drive, WD Red SN700 NVMe SSD 2280.

Installing an M.2 SSD module to ZEN Next-Gen/ZENith Next-Gen - Innuos - High-Fidelity Digital Music Servers and Streamers

This article will show you how to add an M.2 SSD to expand the storage capacity of your ZEN Next-Gen or ZENith Next-Gen, as well as the process for removing

innuos.com

Question is, how accessible is the open internal NVMe PCIe slot, and will it accept the exact same SSD as the M.2 NVMe above.

 

[Stephen Healy]

Hi Bill,

The internal drive is only intended to be accessed by Innuos and approved dealers, which is why there is a public guide only for the M2 bay found on the underside of the Next-Gen.
You cannot fit the same type of M2 drive straight in internally as the slot is a longer PCIe type. You'll need to speak to your dealer regarding fitting a drive internally if you choose not to have one pre-fitted by Innuos.
As an aside, I believe 8TB is not the technical capacity limit of the slot, its simply that there does not seem to be SSDs of this type that are any larger than 8TB available on the market currently. If this changes, then they may well be compatible.

 

[Bill Allen]

Understood!

No doubt Innuos spent endless hours perfecting the balance of the NG's and the last thing you need is someone installing a jack hammer of a SSD directly into the PCI bus on the motherboard. I have measured many SSD's and Jack Hammer is not an exaggeration at this level of the game.

The literature mentions very low watt SSD's are used for the OS in the Zen NG & Zenith NG, 3D TLC & pSLC respectively. I imagine someone huddled over a test bench for days to find ones that measures well, only to find out it sounds bad in practice due to unforeseen permutations. What further light can you shed on the choice of SSD's used for the operating system.

 

[Stephen Healy]

The OS drives used do indeed have a vanishingly low power consumption down to the milliwatts, meaning its electrical and thermal impact on the system is tiny. This is a good result considering what the system is capable of in terms of the overall scope of the OS, including Roon Core etc.
The power-loss protection is also worth remembering; drives can be quite susceptible to bad sectors/corruption in the case of sudden or unexpected power losses. The protection circuit means that the main OS integrity is helped considerably in terms of robustness, longevity and reliability.
The SSD itself also does plug straight into the mainboard without any kind of interconnecting SATA cable.

 

[Bill Allen]

Good stuff Stephen.
That's why plugging a storage SSD straight into the PCIe directly adjacent to the OS SSD is super critical.

That brings us to M.2 drives. I have nearly 6TB of music stored on a Sata SSD inside my Roon Rock, without access to the internal PCIe buss I am forced to focus on a 8TB M.2 SSD for my Zen NG. The choices at 8TB are limited to say the least.

Can you start by telling me what PCIe standard is onboard?

What Are PCIe 4.0 and 5.0? - Intel

Newer PCIe standards mean a higher-bandwidth connection to GPUs, SSDs, and other peripherals.

www.intel.com

DRAM or not to DRAM?
While the 4.0 & 5.0 drives are faster, I'm not sure all the extra monkey motion on these drives are required, or even desired with music storage. Maybe a simple 3.0 drive is best, let the onboard 16GB of DDR4 RAM handle the heavy lifting? However I have yet to find a 8TB M.2 drive without DRAM onboard.

Which then brings us to: Heat Sink or No Heat Sink?

 

[Bill Allen]

While I was still pondering what 8TB SSD to use in the M.2 expansion port the UPS delivery man arrived with my Zen NG.
My hard drive storage concerns can wait, let's fire this puppy up!
Took less then 10 minutes to unbox, sign into Tidal & Qobuz, imports my online playlists, and press play.

Innous Summer Mix on Qobuz ... Oh Yea!

I have it running now for over 24 hours and ... just ... Wow!

 

[Stephen Healy]

Good stuff Stephen.
That's why plugging a storage SSD straight into the PCIe directly adjacent to the OS SSD is super critical.

That brings us to M.2 drives. I have nearly 6TB of music stored on a Sata SSD inside my Roon Rock, without access to the internal PCIe buss I am forced to focus on a 8TB M.2 SSD for my Zen NG. The choices at 8TB are limited to say the least.

Can you start by telling me what PCIe standard is onboard?

What Are PCIe 4.0 and 5.0? - Intel

Newer PCIe standards mean a higher-bandwidth connection to GPUs, SSDs, and other peripherals.

www.intel.com

DRAM or not to DRAM?
While the 4.0 & 5.0 drives are faster, I'm not sure all the extra monkey motion on these drives are required, or even desired with music storage. Maybe a simple 3.0 drive is best, let the onboard 16GB of DDR4 RAM handle the heavy lifting? However I have yet to find a 8TB M.2 drive without DRAM onboard.

Which then brings us to: Heat Sink or No Heat Sink?

Sorry for the delay in replying, Bill
Regarding Heat Sink - no, there is not really any space for this so would get in the way of the enclosure. Also, you only really need a heatsink if being used on very high-speed drives for quite high-intensity applications. Keep in mind this is just music file storage, so the drive does not need to be that intensive.
To that end, we recommend the WD Red SN700. They have a very good balance of speed, power consumption and longevity. 5th gen pcie modules here are not really worth it. For storage you don't need a lot of speed and the faster 5th gens are more power hungry and get hotter for no real benefit pay-off.

 

[Bill Allen]

Thanks for clarifying my concerns regarding M.2 SSD drives for music storage. Unfortunately for me the WD RED M2's top out at 4TB size, as I explained I need 8TB, Western Digital does make the Black 8TB without heatsink. What are your thoughts on this drive?

For those following along that need this amount of storage, I recommend you add 4TB of internal SSD from the factory. 4TB appears to be the current sweet spot price-wise for SSD's.

I can't help to think that perhaps there's an enterprise grade 8TB M.2 drive out there somewhere that would fit the bill. I see you offer a 8 TB M.2 option on the website, can I ask what drive you guys are using?

 

[Stephen Healy]

Apacer have some enterprise options for 8TB, such as this:

PCIe SSD PT160-M280 — Apacer Technology

Apacer is recommended for DRAM/SSD. From high-speed data transmission to data protection, we could provide various industrial SSD/DRAM products.

www.apacer.com

As you say, the cost-per-GB once you go over 4TB does get steep, but as is ever the case the electronics like this it should improve over time.

 

[Bill Allen]

OK I've been too busy listening to worry about storage SSD's.

While there was some ups and down sound quality wise as it ran-in, my Zen Ng finally settled down after a week of 24 hour play, having never stopped once on its own. (A hat trick my Roon Severs could never pull off) I found .75m AQ Coffee USB cables to be the perfect companion to my external Phoenix USB.
Man, does this combo sound good!

You should have called it the Zen NL ... 'Next Level' ... thats the way I hear it.

Outstanding!

 

[Bill Allen]

With the next-level-sound firmly planted in my head ... time to pop the hood on this hot-rod 4 bolt main.

Where the heck is that OS SSD that runs on 1/3 watt, there it is hiding in the corner, a thumbnail sized 120GB SataDOM. Very surprising, very clever! Dead center sits the massive heat sink on the processor, nice, a single open PCIe port and one stick of 16GB Ram with an open extra slot. 32GB of RAM anyone?

After much trepidation I decided on 2 sticks of 4TB WD Black SN7100. Logic being; this SSD is a current release drive, sips power at idle, yet has some giddy up if necessary. Hey, if I ever decide to go with Enterprise SSD's for storage I can always re-purpose these drives for my Laptop. I decided against using a single 8TB M.2 as I'm adverse to using SSD's with onboard DRAM for internal music storage ... I just am! I theorized correctly that one could simply pop a drive inside a M.2 to PCIe adapter (Sabrent in my case) and press it in the open PCIe slot. Then just like the external accessible M.2 port the Zen NG would format and install both drives using the instructions in my opening comment. Yup, total available storage reads 7332.9 GB.

Nobody puts their hands on my hard drives but me. Lol.

Surveying the landscape before popping the lid back on put a big smile on my face. The SSD's could not sit father apart on the board, each living in their own private Idaho, each directly coupled to the board. Even the RAM lives in its own airspace. Next I plugged in my Backup USB Drive from my Zen Mini Mk3, mashed the "Backup Icon" on the screen, followed the instructions to restore this back-up. Around an hour later my entire curated music library was available and working perfectly. All three SSD drives barely warm to the touch at the peak of activity ... cool runnings! Only thing left to do is mash the "Import Icon" and move my entire Roon Rock 4TB+ library. I have to admit that feeling of trepidation has returned.

OK lets hold off on that monster import ... time to kick back and smells the roses.

 

[Bill Allen]

I am tiptoeing through the tulips here, but the sound quality changed immediately after I installed the two 4TB storage drives. Darker, with less leading edge attack, I was forced to swap over to a 'solid silver' AQ Diamond USB cable just to liven things back up. This cast a shadow on my mood, it took three days of 24 hour play before the leading edge and rarified air came back. Installing these two SSD's opened at best what, 8 new PCIe lanes, but look at the TC (temporary chaos) that ensued, who knows how many whirling dervishes happen behind the scenes. No crime, no foul, no animals were abused during this process. This Zen NG is as high-strung as a thoroughbred, sensitive as all get out ... but man can it fly.

Ok I'll say it! Best music server I have ever heard!

When you pay $10K+ for a totally customized computer to play music, perhaps best to leave well enough alone. In hindsight I would have gladly paid $800 for a factory installed 4TB enterprise storage drive. Makes me wonder if Innuos performs special tweaks or specific bios customizations when installing a SSD on the internal PCIe bus?

However with that said I'm a hard-core observationist, I want to hear, feel, touch, experience everything for myself. Yea I want to know what the pSLC OS drive does to the soundstage, what the upgraded power supply brings to the table. Let me hear that fully tweaked i7 processor, but I want to experience these tweaks individually on my own terms. Why should select dealer have all the fun.

This is a hobby after all, some of us are just more hands on than others.

 

[Bill Allen]

I finally got around to importing my 4TB+ music library, took 10 hours, another 2 for Sense to finish compiling.

Decided to pull the music from my archive drive vs a questionable network transfer from my Roon Rock ... I wanted it raw!

This USB spinner is an absolute mess of random unorganized music files, from a collection of 184 Super Audio to .dff transfers, numerous recording studio outtakes with no tagging, to my coveted collection of Cookie Marenco double DSD's from Blue Coast Records. There are LP transfers, AIFF, ALAC, FLAC's, HiRes Tracks, but mainly .wav CD rips from my Technic's ST-G30 ripper/server. Honestly I had no idea what was going to happen!

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise, the entire library was imported warts and all, no issues with the internal WD SN7100 SSD's. Sense did an amazing job organizing, finding cover art, and meta tagging. I still have lots of work with manual edits but I look forward to the end result ... a proper organized curated backup drive of all my music.

I went ahead and jumped in with both feet, upgrading to Sense 3.3.0. No idea what Innuos did under the hood, but I was able to switch back to the AQ Coffee USB cable. Soundstage moved a tad back in the room with average recordings, but expanded to crazy hot air balloon size with the studio DSD's.

Simply outstanding ... best digital I've ever heard!

(How many times am I going to have to say this moving forward ... )