As part of my Touch-based system, I'm planning to buy a large-capacity USB hard drive to hold my entire digital music collection (currently about 2000 CDs, plus a small number of downloaded files; the number of both will slowly grow. I figure that at this point I have c. 1.5TB of data to store, and that a 3TB drive should be enough "future-proofing" capacity).
I will get a small silent computer to run LMS (probably one of the "fit-PC" models); the computer and hard drive can sit next to my Airport Extreme router in my apartment's hallway. The server computer will be Ethernet-cabled to the router, and I don't need the hard drive to be bus-powered--a power supply is fine. I have a few questions regarding choosing from among the brands and models of 3TB USB drives available, and configuring the drive for best operation (I suspect I know some of the answers, but I want to check)--also, one question about the OS for the server computer. Drive Choice: -- Does platter speed matter? I doubt that it would, but since I see at least one 7200 RPM drive among many drives selling for under $200 (I'm in metro NYC; I haven't even yet looked at online-only sellers), I would lean towards a 7200 RPM drive unless there's a reason not to--is there?; -- For future flexibility (say, speed of copying all that data to a backup drive), would it make sense to favor a drive with additional interfaces (USB 3.0, FireWire 400/800, eSATA), over a "plain vanilla" USB 2.0 drive?; Drive Configuration: -- Does the drive format matter? My various laptop and external drives are all NTFS (I transitioned from FAT32 some years back--as you can probably tell, I'm a ol' Wintel guy; my wife is firmly in the Apple camp ;->); -- Since enclosed drives often come with various types of pre-loaded software, I'd be inclined to delete every bit of that stuff from a drive intended only for storing the music library; is that okay? The only exception that occurs to me is software possibly necessary for drive management functions, especially for implementing standby mode/wakeup functions--but wouldn't the host server computer's OS handle that? Is there any utility software that I should leave on the library drive?; -- The entire drive should be set up as one partition, right? Server Computer OS: -- I have zero experience with Linux--and, BTW, only trivial experience with Mac OS; I currently use Windows XP--I expect to be forced to migrate to Windows 7 or 8 (I accept but resent having to climb learning curves that sometimes accompany new OSes, and the time and money costs of buying new computers, finding and installing new hardware drivers, etc., unless there's clear benefits...okay, rant over!). The price difference between Linux-equipped and Win7 Pro-equipped models of fit-PCs is over $200 (sigh). Since I may soon be heading towards Win7/8 on my non-server machines, I may just take this server purchase as an opportunity to "get on board"--but if I was willing to learn about setting up and maintaining a Linux-based server, I could save the price of a 3TB drive. My intuition leans towards buying the Win7 machine, cursing the expense under my breath; thoughts? By the way, my sincere thanks to garym, guidof, aubuti and JohnSwenson for your answers to my "SBT system architecture" questions--really helpful to me, and hopefully useful to others moving along this path. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ jeromeharris's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=56799 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=96069 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
