While many folks won't bat an eye at spending $1000 on 70 new CDs or spend $1500 on a new set of speakers, as soon as you start trying to put together a storage solution for them that costs more than a few hundred dollars they start to flip out.
> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Phil Karn > Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2005 6:15 AM > To: Slim Devices Discussion > Subject: Re: [slim] Need advice on housing 30K of songs > > Chris May wrote: > > Can anyone give me any tips on dealing with 30k or so worth > of songs? > > > > I have a client who has a HUGE CD collection and wants to take the > > cream of the crop and put them on a 250gig or 300gig HD for his > > listening pleasure. > > I only discovered the Squeezebox a few months ago. My boss > got one and began raving about it, and it's pretty rare for > him to say nice things about *any* product. So I got one (a > second is now on order), and it prompted me to get finally > serious about the home audio server I've always wanted to build. > > I already had a Linux box acting as a server for the house, > which I was already planning to expand, so I just added a few > more drives. The main Linux file systems reside on a software > RAID-1 array of two 250GB IDE drives. I perform monthly > backups by the simple expedient of removing one drive every > month and replacing it with a new drive or an old recycled > backup and letting the mirror rebuild automatically. This > gives me a complete bootable backup image of my system for no > more downtime than it takes to power down, swap the drives > (it's in a removable caddy) and reboot. I *highly* recommend > this arrangement for any system that can hold two hard > drives. Tape is utterly obsolete as a backup medium, and DVDs > are also too slow and small. The only way to back up today's > hard drives are onto more hard drives. > > Large, relatively static databases like music and personal > photo collections reside on six 300 GB SATA drives in a > RAID-5 configuration: > 4 data drives, 1 parity drive and one online spare. I > strongly recommend SATA if you're going to have this many > drives in one box, as the cabling would otherwise be a mess. > Each drive is split into 50GB partitions, so four data > partitions joined in RAID-5 will produce a 200 GB virtual > file system. This is a manageable size for rsync backups onto > external hard drives that I keep off site or in a safe, as my > drive rotation scheme won't work for RAID-5. I currently use > two of those 200GB RAID-5 file systems for the slimserver > music archive (currently 15,567 songs). > > I rip all my CDs in FLAC format and keep them in a storage > facility as an off site backup, somewhat less vulnerable to > burglary. With hard disks now so roomy and cheap, I saw no > reason to use any other format, at least not for my master > archive. The extra disk cost was minimal, less than the value > of my time ripping all my CDs again. (I'd already ripped many > of them before into MP3 or Ogg, and I don't want to ever have > to rip them again.) We'll use MP3, Ogg or AAC, produced from > the FLAC versions, only for secondary copies in iPods, > laptops and car players. > > Phil > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss > _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
