donqwan wrote: > I am getting ready to bite the bullet and digitize my music > collection of ~600 CD's to both FLAC (for listening @ home) and 196 > kbps Mp3 (for the iPods).
The rule of thumb for FLAC filesize is that you'll be able to store approx. 3 CDs per 1 GB of storage. So, for just the FLAC portion of your library, you're looking at about 200GB. MP3 filesize varys more, but you should be safe adding about 25% to the FLAC storage requirement. That brings you to 250GB. You'll want to add some headroom for growth, and for the funny math that HDD makers use to calculate their storage sizes. For safety's sake, and while still being very economical, you could get a good 500GB rated drive. These are running about $100 right now. Note that two of these will cost about $150 less than a single 1TB drive. > Am I better off with a 1TB Lacie with firewire, or a 1TB WD with > ethernet? For best performance and packaging, just mount this HDD as a second drive inside your desktop computer's case. (This assumes you have a desktop, with an additional HDD mounting point and a sufficient power supply.) If this is not the case, think external. I'd also recommend getting an external drive of the same or larger capacity than your primary storage drive. This will let you run occasional backups, and give you the option of keeping your backup offsite. You'll appreciate the value of this once you begin putting time into the ripping and tagging process. For performance reasons, I'd recommend an HDD with a SATA interface, whether mounting internally or externally. For external cases, these are your external interface options in rough order of decreasing performance: eSATA > FW800 > FW400 >= USB2 > 1000BaseT > 100BaseT > USB1 For flexibility and future-proofing, look for a case with both USB2 and one of either Firewire or eSATA interfaces. (IcyDock makes some nice ones for about $60-70.) A dedicated NAS solution is going to be generally more expensive and give lower performance than a direct attached solution. The benefits of a NAS is that it can be a low power device that services an entire network (even when your desktop is powered down) and that it may offer a user friendly way of achieving RAID. Note that you'd still want a backup, even with RAID, and that your storage requirements don't compel a spanned solution. So, unless you really like the idea of a NAS, you'll almost certainly be better and more cheaply served by a two HDD system. --rt _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
