Neill, I bet you are right about the external HD spinning down. I mean, yes, it could be any number of things as listed by Tim, but the external HD is the most likely cause.
So unfortunately you will need to find a different reason to buy a Pi 4 :-)
FWIW, I've just bought my first Pi (which is a 4 B 2GB) and it does feel like a bit of overkill for a dedicated moOde player. CPU and RAM utilization is extremely low. A few notes based on some other comments in the thread;
1) I've got mine in a Flirc passive case and it runs cool enough. I absolutely refuse to have an actively cooled device as my audio player.
Code:
moode@moode:~ $ ./my-pi-temp.sh
Wed Dec 20 07:51:26 MST 2023 @ moode
-------------------------------------------
GPU temp => temp=45.7'C
CPU temp => 45'C
Core => volt=0.8600V
I see it climb to 60'C or so sometimes, which is nothing if you consider that these chips are tested up to 120'C and don't even start throttling till around 80-85'C.
See here.
2) I'm using a Khadas Tone Board 1 over USB and the audio quality is superb. The only time there is any "popping" is if I am dumb enough to reboot the Pi while my pre-amp and amp are powered up and the pre-amp is set to the DAC input. The easy solution is to switch the pre-amp to a different input while rebooting the Pi.
