External hard drive for expanding iTunes library?

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

Late to the table but here is my 2 cents. In the pro photo world, the g drive is THE standard. And trust me losing a 200,000 dollar job is alot worse than losing cd's that have been burned. Hope that helps.

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.

For music files speed doesn't matter. Even 10Mbps is fast enough to rip and play discs and with RAID the backup is done in the background. Besides, how can a gigabit transfer rate be slower than USB? Please explain.

If a Buffalo TB NAS can be had for $600 how can you build it cheaper? How do you get a TB of drives, RAID controller, interface with USB ports, and a case with power supply for less than $600?

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

More details please. It sounds interesting but I can't figure out how to pull it off.

What volume of storage will you get for your $500? To equal a TB in RAID 5 (about 700 gig) with only 2 disks in RAID 1 would take the Seagate 750 gig drives which are over $300 each. So thats $600+ and you have to add the rest.

What enclosure do you use for the drives?
Is the RAID hardware or software based?
Would this work with multiple drives? I have over a TB of files so need multiple drives.

Thanks

Regardless of what drive and configuration you choose, you should back up your data.

Hmm... Michael, isn't a terastation a "file server"? If you can put together a two drive RAID1 for $500, you are doing pretty well. But, your net cost is $2/GB--$500/250GB (this is assuming you are buying 250GB drives and using RAID1, which nets you 250GB of usable storage). My Terastation cost $600, but nets me 700GB of storage with the more efficient RAID5 spanning four drives--about $0.85/GB. So, in some ways, the Terastation is still cheaper. In further defense of the Terastation, I'd note that it can be operated as a USB drive, if that is what you want.

As far as speed goes, streaming 44.1/16 bit audio is about 1.4 mbps. I believe the Terastation's highest transfer rate is about 150 mbps (although there is a jumbo block mode that runs 450 mbps). Maybe that isn't 800 mbps firewire (which isn't, I believe, a sustained rate), but its fast enough by several orders of magnitude. There are those streaming 1080i and 720p content from terastations.

As far as the G-Drive goes, "pro photo" doesn't have the same goals as high end audio. I do image processing on my machine, and have an expensive WD Raptor drive that spins at 10K RPM for that. For image processing, fast is the end all be all, which means they are looking for high RPM drives configured in striped arrays. Think xServe RAID set up as RAID 0+1.

Bottom line is that for image processing, I'd prioritize transfer speed over redundancy, and use DVD ROM as a backup. For audio, I'd prioritize redundancy over transfer speed.