Hard disk

A claim made quite often in PC based audiophile forums is that reducing electrical activity inside the PC improves sound quality.
Memory playback (reading the file from the HD and store it in memory before playback starts) is one of the tweaks.
As the media player reads from memory, this reduces HD access.
Reduces? Yes, it won’t prevent other processes to access the HD.
But of course, a dedicated audio PC is tweaked to death so hardly any other process will be running.

 

A very simple and effective way to minimize head movements is to defragment your files.
This minimizes head movements and sure reduces the acoustical noise!

An alternative is to replace the HD by a SSD, no motor, no head, no moving parts at all.

 

 

When I wrote this in 2012, SSDs were very expensive.
Today (2017) a 1 TB sets you back approximately 400 Euro.
Although 4 times the price of a traditional HD, large capacity SSDs have become affordable.