pc vs mac, eac vs itunes

Sufentanil: You raise an important issue as to going with a RAID. As between RAID and concantenating individual drives (JBOD) RAID is probably a better idea. My understanding is that RAID or JBOD has the primary advantage of allowing the system to see one large partition rather than a number of different partitions. Say that one had, for eg. three external 1 terabyte drives (with the artists separated alphabetically i.e. A-H drive J, I-P drive K and Q-Z drive L) and was willing to simply look at the respective drive to grab the music, would the only advantage of having the single large partition be that you didn't have switch between drives, or am I missing something more fundamental here - such as software limitations in accessing the music held on separate partitions.

Musicnoise - As I understand RAID drives work either in stripping or mirroring mode. Stripping increases speed (not needed here) but makes security even worse (one drive fails - you loose both) while mirroring provides automatic backup (writes to both disks at the same time) but is also not very secure since protects only from drive failure and not from virus or OS going crazy. The best in my opinion is separate disk kept unpowered in remote location. There is no need for more than one disk since 1.5TB mentioned previously would hold about 6000 CDs in Apple Lossless. There is no need for separating disks alphabetically unless you have more than 6000 CDs (not likely).

EAC is a pain in the butt and offers no advantage whatsoever over DBpoweramp which uses the identical error correction program which is what makes EAC so good. DBpoweramp is very easy to use and you can rip to whatever format you like. I used FLAC as it was identical in every way to WAV (dont listen to those guys who say WAV is better, I spent hours upon hours of comparing WAV versus FLAC rips and they are IDENTICAL, absolutely, period, end of story!). WAV is pita and it does not hold tags and takes more space, there is no reason to use WAV for anything.

I would not rip using iTunes as it does not do error correction. If you want to use a MAC use DBPOWERAMP and rip to AIFF.....If you want to use a PC rip to FLAC.

Acurus - If I remember correctly EAC reads offending sector up to 16 times and picks better 8. MAX (free application) uses CDParanoia error correction algorithm (reading CD as data CD) with option to specify number of attempts or set it to "no skip".

You are right about Itunes - it either doesn't correct at all or does it poorly. I found disks that are completely rejected by MAX in "no skip" mode (I need to lower iteration or polish them to pass) while I tunes rips them skipping over problem area. During playback I hear gaps.

Kijanki,

RAID and JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives) is somewhat different. First, RAID (except RAID 0, which just mirrors drives) puts different pieces of the data on different drives. JBOD usually functions as multiple drives melded into one. So with RAID data could likely be spread across multiple drives, less typical with JBOD. When reading, this means that each drive can access different parts of that data and the controller pieces it all together, and could theoretically be faster. (There is a penalty, however, when writing.)

Your assertion that reliability is affected by RAID because "one drive fails, you lose both" is incorrect. First, if you only have 2 drives, you use RAID 1, which basically means that each drive is a mirror image of the other, so losing one means you still have an identical functioning copy. With 3+ drives you can use RAID 5, which spreads that data across all drives and also scatters redundant data such that effectively the total of one drive is used to store the redundant information. Now if you lose one drive it is completely reconstructable using the redundant information scattered across the remaining drives.

RAID's purpose (except for RAID level 0, which offers no redundancy) is to preserve data in the event of a drive failure. I repeatedly warn people, though, that it does not protect against other common causes of lost data, such as accidental deletion of files, user screwups, viruses, etc. That's what backups are for!

Michael