but ended-up going in a different direction. If you're not in a hurry, one thing you could consider doing is signing-up for Western Digital's email notification list and waiting for a good deal in your in-box. Sometimes they have crazy deals and they sell drives of all types factory direct. Sometimes they'll even sell re-furbished equipment that comes with a warranty.

But, the problem with an external drive is that all hard drives will fail someday and if you don't have any type of redundancy or backup (like when you're using a single external drive for data storage) all that data will be lost. Every hard drive will fail eventually.

Here's what I did: For media storage I'm running three refurbished WD 7200 rpm SATA, 250 gig drives in a RAID 5 array (500 gig total storage)--and each drive was only like $82.00 through the factory. Using "Refurbished" and "hard drive" in the same sentence makes me a little uneasy, but with the RAID 5 even if one drive fails I still have not lost any data unless a second drive would happen to fail before I replaced the first bad one.

Depending upon how much media you want to store you could maybe consider building a RAID 1 array which runs duplicate disks and can be rebuilt without data loss when one drive fails. The downside is that you only get to use half of the storage that you purchase. If you can't tolerate the idea of losing half the storage capacity that you've purchased, there are some consumer targeted RAID 5 controller cards that are fairly inexpensive that are pretty good. I'm using a card made by Promise that was like $200, and it performs the parity calculations internally so the CPU doesn't get bogged-down. I'm only running 3 drives but it's expandable to 4. So total I was able to put together 500 Gigs of redundant, backed-up, internal media storage for like $450.00.



posted by 12.106.1...

• ot>external hard drive for music., kooch, Sun, 15 Jan 2006 05:54:43
  • I went with a Western Digital Firewire 250MB, Scott Paterson , Mon, 16 Jan 2006 20:50:51
  • Re: ot>external hard drive for music., rob , Mon, 16 Jan 2006 14:49:24
  • I was looking to do the same thing, Drew In Houston, Sun, 15 Jan 2006 22:42:55 <-- Viewing This Message
  • Re: ot>external hard drive for music., 79-900t , Sun, 15 Jan 2006 11:07:19
  • why not internal?, GM, Sun, 15 Jan 2006 07:53:09
    • Portability, sonique, Sun, 15 Jan 2006 07:56:51
      • Re: Portability, cryptical, Sun, 15 Jan 2006 09:13:07
  • Yes songs don't take much space but disk drives are...., TKC, Sun, 15 Jan 2006 07:32:15
  • Re: ot>external hard drive for music., cryptical, Sun, 15 Jan 2006 07:28:46
    • I have both NAS and a Firewire external, Geoff, Sun, 15 Jan 2006 08:32:19
  • songs dont take much space, john, Sun, 15 Jan 2006 07:10:23

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