Ripping 700 CD's to HD using FLAC-How much space?

RAID is great when it works, but can be difficult to setup properly for non IT administrators. A NAS with built in RAID is a good option, but you do pay extra for this.

Another option for safety is just to pop in another drive that's the same capacity as your music drive, and just setup a daily job in windows to backup the drive. Not as technically fancy as a RAID, but no need to buy or manage hardware or software RAID controllers, which can also fail.

Blindjim, you wrote: "Another thought here is, FLAC allows you to select the bit rate...".

It seems to me you are mistaken. You cannot choose the bit rate, but you can choose the level of compression. Also, there is no such thing as "the usual default of 768". The resulting bit rate of a FLAC file depends on the complexity of the music (for example, jazz be compressed more than heavy metal) and the choosen compression level.

Chris74,

I have a large collection of FLAC, which I keep on DVD+RW disks. You can make use of my statistics: I have currently 1146 albums and they are stored on 93 DVD+RW disks. It means that 1 DVD disk contains on average 12,3 albums. One DVD disk can store 4482 Mb, it means that one album on average occupies 364 Mb.

If you rip your 700 CDs into FLAC, you will need, based on my experience, 249 Gb. This figure will be 10-20% bigger if your albums are hard-to-compress music genres (hard rock, black metal, etc.) Also, this figure will be 10-20% less if you listen primarily to easier-to-compress styles (soul, jazz, voice, a capella, etc.)

I hope it helps.

Regards,
Evgeny K.

Evgeny, Thanks for the insight in regards to the amount of space you have used on your FLAC DVD-RW storage disks, that really helps shed some light on ways to store the media using a "hard back up" method other than keeping the original disks. Speaking for myself, storing (roughly) 75 DVD-RW disks would take up far less space than 700 disks with covers, no doubt about it!

FLAC compression is like a "zip" file on a computer - it is a lossless way of storing data with mathematical formulas instead of the raw data of the wave form. This is different from .mp3 compression that actually eliminates data points and relies on an algorithm to draw a new wave form. In FLAC compression, the higher the compression, the more time the processor will take to "unzip" the file.

However, once "unzipped" the raw data is the same as the original wave form, regardless of the compression level.