Uniti Star SD Card

Posted by: Anavrin on 01 September 2018

Hi Guys

I have a potable USB hard drive plugged into the back of my Uniti Star, I’ve been using it for storing my CD Rip (wav) files.

The problem I’ve had is every now and then, I can’t play anything off the drive, I can browse it but all the album art is missing and nothing plays, I don’t know if this is a drive problem or a Uniti problem, but after a complete power off to the wall, it all works again.

So I’m thinking of switching to using an SD Card instead of the usb drive, as I feel it might be more reliable, lower capacity but I don’t have a large music library so that’s not a problem.

Am I right in assuming I can just go for any size, any speed or capacity SD Card, is there any benefit choosing a high spec branded card over a cheapo eBay special?

I don’t think so as even the cheap ones boast 80mb/s speed, so more than enough to read wav files, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this.

Posted on: 01 September 2018 by TallGuy

Be careful with cheap and cheerful cards from the likes of eBay- there’s loads of fraudsters selling , for example, “64Gb” cards which are nothing of the sort - they’re actually very small, but with an invalid partition table so that they describe themselves as 64Gb, but will give errors as soon as you fill the actual size, which is often around 2Gb.

You should buy from a reputable dealer, but, as you say, you don’t need anything fancy so it will still be cheap

Posted on: 02 September 2018 by james n

I always buy branded cards such as Sandisk. Never had any issues and the prices for the lower capacity versions are very reasonable.

Posted on: 02 September 2018 by joerand

TallGuy posted:
Be careful with cheap and cheerful cards from the likes of eBay- there’s loads of fraudsters selling , for example, “64Gb” cards which are nothing of the sort - they’re actually very small, but with an invalid partition table so that they describe themselves as 64Gb, but will give errors as soon as you fill the actual size, which is often around 2Gb.

I'm not sure about "cheap and cheerful" but Ebay has a credible feedback system and I suspect any such fraudulent sellers would be quickly exposed and eradicated. There's no reason anyone should worry about purchasing a SD card from Ebay provided the seller has a quality feedback rating. Little reason to go cheap when genuine SanDisk high-speed 32 GB cards are available for $10.

Posted on: 02 September 2018 by Anavrin

Cheers guys

I’ve got a couple of Sandisk 32gb cards, not big enough but I’ll transfer some music to one, just to try it out and find out if it still hangs like the USB Hard drive, I’ve also spotted the high capacity USB memory sticks are a lot cheaper than SD cards but I’m not sure if the usb issue is with the Uniti so I’ll try an SD Card first.

Posted on: 02 September 2018 by ChrisSU

You might also try a USB memory stick as a very cheap form of solid state storage, I’ve found these to work well in Naim streamers. I usually use an online retailer called MyMemory for this kind of stuff. The last one I bought was a 256GB Integral for about £30.