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which external hard disc for music storage?

i want to store my music uncompressed on an external hard disc and play it via a dedicated ibook (or similar) and external dac through a high-end audio system. can anyone suggest what might be the best external hard disc? looks, price and size apart i guess quietness is key. are there other factors to consider? i have about 400Gb of music to store. are there any relative performance issues in filling a 500Gb disc 80% versus to half fill a 750Gb disc? i am currently considering a fanless LaCie.
garbo
rdc2000
27 posts
 
If you have a home network or are planning one, and don't want to be tied down by cables, it's the only way to go.
peter_s
1,340 posts
 
Rdc2000 - what is the only way to go???

I'd like to expand this discussion to include network access (NAS) drives. NAS is attractive to me because computers often go to sleep while the NAS drives can be accessed from multiple devices and are not attached to a computer. Anyone have experience using/choosing NAS drives?
rdc2000
27 posts
 
NAS drives are what I wrote was the way to go, but the Subject line disappeared.

I have a Maxtor 320g network Drive. So far it's great. Quiet when warmed up but weirdly noisy when first starting up.

I almost bought a Buffalo drive, which are supposed to be very good. I got scared off when I read some reviews that they are slow.
kennyt's avatar
kennyt
1,226 posts
 
I just put the WD 1TB SATA internal drive into my Mac for just this use, I got it @ Best Buy for $229 straight up, no rebate.

Now I want to find a good way to have iTunes compress the entire collection onto another disc in Apple Lossless (other drive is smaller and I want to use it in the wife's computer for ease of use for her)

Does anyone know how to best do this?

I found a way to have it compress the library, but that leaves me with two copies in the same library.
computeraudiophile
18 posts
 
I highly recommend the Data Robotics Drobo. You can add more disk whenever you need and the Drobo will use as much as possible while keeping a backup copy.

Chris C.

Founder
ComputerAudiophile.com
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