Need advice on what to purchase to hold 1TB of music and connect to my new Innuos Pulsar.

Understand.  Hope you are correct! Thank you @phishhhhh4 

@grannyring :

The Pulsar is like a Zenith 3 plus Phoenix in sound quality or so I read. Not sure this is really true. I loved my Zenith 3 and will miss its ease if use with internal storage. The Zenith 3 also rips CDs and auto loads them. The Pulsar costs some $1100 more than the Zenith 3 with no CD ripping ability or storage.

I currently have the Zenith MK3. It will go nowhere until it breaks. When the Pulse series came out, I cannot say I did not consider purchasing the Pulsar. I decided against it for these very reasons you describe. Unless of course I had a second system to use, which I don’t. So Zennith remains. And I have owned and used the ZEN, the Phoenix USB, and the Statement in the past. Let’s just say I am back to Zenith and happy with it.

@grannyring, bummer. I just checked the Innuos website and understandably the prices have increased significantly since I bought my Zenith Mk3 back in 2019. If I had to replace it I am not sure what I would do. Like @thyname, I also owned the Phoenix USB but sold it. I only use 60% of the 1TB storage I have on my Zenith but honestly my streaming SQ is so good I rarely play local files. I'm fortunate to have a couple Innuos dealers nearby so if I had to replace it I would do an in-store comparison of the Pulse vs Pulsar and then put the winner up against the Zenith in a home demo. I already have my library backed up on SSD and buying media is mostly in the rear view for me so the server functionality of Zenith is less of a requirement. If Pulsar won the SQ home bakeoff I would connect the SSD to one of the machines on my home network and map it to Pulsar. I'm guessing there would be a SQ compromize compared to playing from a Zenith, but in my case it would only be used for music not found on streaming services or the rare case where my external network to my ISP is down.

@chilehed

My thoughts and experience match yours 100%. I stream most of the time as I find it sounds as good or often times better than ripped CDs. The Pulsar will sound better than the Pulse and Zenith 3. I good friend compared his Zenith 3 to a Pulsar in his system over a 2-3 week period and he much preferred the Pulsar. He said the Pulsar exceed the Zenith in every sonic parameter. He is very impressed with the Pulsar. I will share my thoughts after full burn in of some 200-300 hours.

Innuos told me a NAS should sound as good as the internal storage in the Zenith.

@thyname 

Funny, I owned the Phoenix reclocker and sold it after realizing it did not improve my systems sound quality with my then new MOJO Audio dac. 

@grannyring, great info, thanks! I'll be interested in your commentary and experience after it settles in. Best of luck and congratulations on the new piece.

You’re all recommending SSD drives. I choose thumb drives, because they are lower powered than SSD’s, which suck power to make them as fast as possible. I will do some critical testing, now that I’m talking about it, to try to hear a difference. I can hear both sounding less noisy than a mechanical drive, right away.

Do you guys have anything against thumb drives, besides the current max size being 1tb, and it’s price vs SSD?

I’m in the market for a 1tb stick, right now, but I could be convinced to go with the cheaper and larger usb ssd, if anyone has a way to make me think that the higher power draw won’t hurt my ears, even theoretically. Oh, theoretically is probably the way the thumb stick will win.

Comments?

A one-off answer, but you want to make sure you have a backup (or several). 

The 1TB cost will be meaningless if (when) you have a disk failure. I think my Google account, up to 1TB of cloud storage is $9.99 - there are many options.