nDac not recognising USB memory stick

"Not all sticks work" is the most detail I've ever heard.  As a practical matter . . . yes just return those and try others.  When you find some that work -- stock up!  (Or find a better solutions . . . after a while isn't keeping track of what music is on what stick a bit painful?)

Then, some sticks work but work less well later.

I had a stick work beautifully for months then music started playing on pitch but slow. Thankfully I had backups. As a  result I only use sticks for DSD (my USB converter doesn't do dsd).

I don't actually keep the music on USB sticks. Just copy it from the PC, listen, delete, and then copy the next music of choice. Whilst a bit fiddly it compliments listening to CDs, as I still do. Rather than going the streaming route it has allowed me to concentrate expenditure on  amplification...DR's etc! A good workable solution for me. 

I've seen these same USB sticks fail to work in a PC.  They can be troublesome but a quick Google may help.  

I've always bought the cheapest USB sticks I could find, usually own-brand ones from an online seller called MyMemory, and never had a problem with any of them.

Hardbop,

Likely down to the encrypted partition on the sandisk. If the nDac can't read the full device it presumes the usb device is unreadable. It isn't able to ignore sections as it has only limited computational ability.  As good as Sandisk products generally are there are also some real duffers. Had microsd cards that corrupted my Sony phone.  For a robust, fast loading device try Corsair, or if its one play and done go with Chris's suggestion. 

Andy

HardBop posted:

I know this has been discussed before, but the problem appears to persist. I have been happily using various USB memory sticks from different companies (including SanDisk) to play downloaded music through the nDAC without any problems for a couple of years. However I recently bought four SanDisk Cruzer Force (8GB) sticks, which refuse to play on the DAC. None of the front panel lights come on when the stick is inserted in either front or rear ports. I have tried both WAV and FLAC formats, and can confirm the sticks play fine on the PC and in my car...so the problem appears to lie with the DAC reading the files from this particular model? I have also reformatted the USB stick, but still no joy.

I will be returning the sticks and will try another make/model, but anyone any similar experience or thoughts on reasons/solutions? Thanks.

I have tried to collect information about the USB drives that are known not to work with the Naim DAc in https://forums.naimaudio.com/to...rted-usb-drives-list with little success. USB drives compatibility / support also seems to vary with firmware upgrades, as one would expect,

The bottom line seems to be that Naim is not able to (or interested in) providing detailed information on nDAC USB drives compatibility but also that Naim users do not really care about this issue. I guess that very few nDAC users are actually taking advantage of the device's USB ports and compatibility problems tend to show up only when firmware upgrades become available.

I've had similar issues and it was always because some machine it was slotted into wrote a hidden partition it didn't like. Reformatting the stick in Windows or Mac never clears that partition, just the primary one. I found the solution to reverting these sticks to pristine virgin drives is to slot them to a Unix or Linux machine and direct IO them with zeros. You need to figure out the actual device path that the driver uses but then it is simple. If you find that the device path of the stick is /dev/sdc for example, you can wipe it together with pesky partitions with the command

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=512

It might take some time to complete but you can then format it normally and it should be fine again. Just don't put in the wrong device path!

Thanks for all the comments/suggestions. It does appear it's down to trial and error, but these are the first sticks I've had problems with. Yes NBPF, it does appear this is a relatively low priority for Naim. I'm afraid I've had a similar lacklustre response from Naim some time ago regarding the inability of the nDac to play FLAC files using memory stick, without inserting annoying track gaps. No problem with WAV or DSD. I thought the last firmware update would consider/resolve this, but seemingly not so. Shame, as otherwise I have the greatest regard for the Company, being a satisfied customer for 30+ years.