High-end music server manufacturer Olive Media will soon offer...

High-end music server manufacturer Olive Media will soon offer an solid state drive (SSD) storage option in its 06HD and 04HD servers, Robert Altmann, senior vice president of business development, told us at CES. In December, Olive Media qualified OCZ’s Deneva 2 SSD drives for its servers based on the drive’s performance, energy efficiency and low-noise operation, Altmann said. Olive contacted OCZ, a San Jose, Calif.,-based company, because “we thought it would make sense to develop a product with an SSD,” Altmann said. The “huge benefits” of SSD storage for hi-fi playback are speed -- a boot-up time that’s 5-10 seconds faster than a hard disk -- and a lack of moving parts, which translates to “no operational or electronic noise,” Altmann said. Introduction of electronic noise by a hard drive is especially important in high-end audio, though the company “already isolates noise so well” in its music servers that the electronic noise introduced by drives is not “acoustically discernible,” Altmann said. Another benefit of SSD is lower operating temperature due to lower power consumption, he said. “Theoretically,” he said, “the reliability of those drives is much better because SSDs have a theoretical lifespan of 80 years.” Altmann said it’s “hard to say” what the lifetime is for the company’s standard hard disk drives because “it’s not a matter of if, but when, they'll fail.” The company has had very few problems with products currently in the market, which Olive has been shipping since 2005. “The application we use the hard drives for is very read-intensive so we don’t have much strain on them versus a PC that’s doing a lot of things at the same time,” he said. The primary drawback of SSDs at this point is the value proposition, Altmann said. He showed us a 480-gigabyte hard drive with a manufacturing cost of $750. The 04 and 06 hard-disk-based servers have 2-terabyte drives. “We are basically selling SSD at cost to our customers,” because the company is less interested in making money on the storage technology and more interested in testing the SSD storage concept “to see if our customers accept this type of solution in a music server.”