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External hard drive for expanding iTunes library?

My hard drive is nearly full and I need to get an external HD for my rapidly expanding music library. I use iTunes and stream the music to my Airport Express to my Marantz SR-7200's DAC . Using a bel-canto eVo 6 and Gallo Ref 3's makes good music to me. All my music files are Aiff(uncompressed) and currently use 106GB. I've read good reviews online about the G-DRIVE 500GB External Hard Drive but I'm curious if any other Audiogoners have used it or could recommend other large,quiet and reliable external hard drives. My computer is an iMac G-5.
Thanks for any help.
Howell
hals_den
lovegasoline
4 posts
 
I've decided to go with a Western Digital Caviar SE16 (WD5000AAKS or WD5000AAKS) 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive. Noise etsts are here:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article617-page1.html

This drive can be bought for about $130 online.

For an enclosure I’ll drop it in a well made fanleess USB2/Firewire enclosure (I'll use the FW 400 connection on my Mac):

a)Mcalley 3.5in USB 2.0/1394 Aluminum Enclosure - PHR-100AC (about $39 online)

or a more expensive alternative:

b)OWC Mercury Elite-AL Oxford911+ FireWire & USB 2.0/1.1
(about $80)

At $180 shipped for the whole enchilada it comes to 36¢/gigabyte [if I'm correct, the breakdown cost is 15¢/digitized CD]. Of course, I have a drive for backup.

This is for a Macintosh based system. I have a G5 Desktop (also a G4 iBook) and the G5 is a pretty quiet machine, it has been in the room in which I listen to music and it doesn't distract me.
lovegasoline
4 posts
 
Scratch my previous post's solution. It would work if the HD was internally mounted in an Apple G5...a quiet drive. But, it will NOT work with the two enclosures mentioned...the hard drive is SATA and the enclosures are compatible with ATA drives only. SATA enclosures are expensive so I'll need to find a quiet ATA drive.
morris
29 posts
 
Go on newegg.com. SATA is now standard. I checked. They have 81 different external enclosures for sale for a 3.5" drive, with some inexpensive ones for less than $40. Please let us know how it works out for you and what you think about the noise level.
sufentanil's avatar
sufentanil
776 posts
 
Cytocycle, I found the link you provided interesting. I don't have the Thecus N5200, but I have the N4100 at home and it appears that they run at vastly different speeds. My N4100 gives 1/10 the performance of the N5200 according to their data.

My impression of my Thecus N4100 is this. The only thing that went easily was installing the drives. That went without a hitch. But then I had a terrible time configuring it. I sent an e-mail to Thecus and got a cryptic response back. I ended up upgrading the firmware, and things got better after that, well, once I figured out a peculiarity of the two network jacks and their default network addresses. The bottom line is that it wasn't the easiest thing to set up, and it's slow as molasses. I use it for backups because it's too slow to be used for anything else. Maybe the newer N5200 has fixed many of these problems?

That's why I now advocate home-built NAS solutions. It's about the same price, and you can spend just a few dollars for an Ubuntu Linux DVD and it's all the software purchase you'll have to make. And it's MUCH faster for me. You can also use it as your web server, router, firewall, etc. Add to that the possibility of automated remote backups and you can see why I much prefer this option.

Michael
morris
29 posts
 
Cyctocyle, thanks for the informative post. Do you know anything about how the new USB share drive on the Apple Airport Extreme will work with a MAC system? It seems like you could connect multiple large USB drives to an Airport Extreme and create a pretty inexpensive remote, wireless hard disk server for music, since it doesn't require high speed.
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