External hard drive for expanding iTunes library?

I agree with Edesilva that an NAS RAID array is a good way to go. If I had to do over I would go that route.

I think it is interesting that Michael has declared hard drives to be extremely reliable based on his experience and Edesilva has declared external drives to be inherently unreliable based on his. While I don't think either one has enough data based on these personal experiences to back up their claims about these devices as a whole, there is an overwhelming body of evidence that finds hard drives unreliable enough that it is considered foolish to operate without a backup.

It's also interesting to note that the actual hard drive in an external drive is exactly the same drive that is used internaly, the difference being the case, the interface (usb or firewire or ethernet) and the power supply which is usually a wall wart. If you visit Audio Asylum's PC forum you see many declarations supporting the idea that external drives are unreliable. But why should that be if they are the same drives used internally? Could it be the heat?

Some of those failures which are attributed to the drives are actually due to the interface or the wall wart. I've had the interface fail in 2 of those cheap $29 cases and would have tossed a perfectly good drive if I hadn't removed the drive to test it.

I purchased the G-Drive for my iTunes library and returned it because it was noisier than my OWC Mercury Elite Pro (300 gig) that I use for back up. So I purchased another OWC Elite-AL Pro 500 for less money than the G-Drive and now use it for my iTunes music library. I'm very happy with it so far. But my primary concern was the noise, so I can't comment on the reliability (yet). From my experience, you can hear the spinning of the HD on all external drives, but the OWC was definitely quieter than the G-Drive.

The G Drive arrived yesterday but I haven't connected it yet because I don't have the correct cable. But I see there is a power swith on the back and wonder if switching the power off when I'm not listening to iTunes is a good idea? I plan on keeping only music files on the G Drive. Why would I want to leave it on 24/7?

In my application, I was running several different music servers off the same basic library of data files; leaving then on 24/7 is a lot easier than running downstairs to turn on a drive. If this isn't the case, then by all means turn it off. I'd note that Lacie drives I was using were the FA Porsche design ones, which I will be the first to admit may compromise heat dissipation for style. The maxstor drive I blew up was some odd blue organic shape looking thing.

I've had dozens of hard drives over the years (several of them external). Only 1 of them has catastrophically failed. By contrast, I've lost 3 computer power supplies. Maybe I'm just lucky when it comes to drives. (Most of them have been from Seagate, with several Western Digital. The failed one was a Maxtor, but that was only after 5 or 6 years.)

And while temperature is one of the many variables collected by S.M.A.R.T (a tool available in all drives produced in the past decade for predicting drive failure), according to people who know drives a lot more than I do, it's not all that predictive. (In fact, S.M.A.R.T isn't overly accurate in predicting failure.) For most electronic devices, it's the thermal stresses (ie, turning it off and on repeatedly) rather than the steady-state temperature that really causes problems. That's one of the reasons for keeping the units powered 24/7.

I'll disagree with a previous poster's suggestion about a NAS device. They're relatively expensive (you can build a fileserver with similar capabilities cheaper), and they're SLOW. Transferring at only 10 MB/s (at best) will get old really fast. (I have a 1 TB NAS and a gigabit ethernet network, and its chief limitation is the speed.) You can get better throughput with a USB or FireWire device and at a much better price.

Better still, build your own fileserver with 2 drives running in RAID 1 (full redundancy) for well under $500. Then get an external hard drive to back up the fileserver (RAID doesn't protect against viruses or user accidentally deleting things -- just drive failure).

Michael