Which hard drive for digital music server?

Er, Dell PowerVault 745N. 1TB of hardware RAID5, four hot-swappable drives that net out to about 700MB of real storage. Loud as a 747 on the runway, tho', so I'd also recommend an acoustilock vCab.

Apple xServe RAID is a cool looking option too.

Seriously, I had *bad* problems with disk crashes using consumer drives. I really don't think they are supposed to be on 24x7...

I've had very good experiences with LaCie drives. I've also used Western Digital, Maxtor and Seagate with some success. All hard drives will eventually fail, so as long as you back them up I don't think it makes that much difference what you use as long as it's reasonably quiet.

It's critical that you also back up your iTunes library files.

For IDE, I like the Seagate Barracuda series - very very quiet.

If you can isolate them acoustically, a 15K rpm SCSI set up on a dual channel controller is THE way to go for performance in both audio and video. I can see and hear a distinct smoothness to them as compared to an older, slower (5400 rpm) drive which I had in the same chassis.

I've been very partial to Seagate drives as well, and I'd suggest using the Baracuda 7200rpm SATA drives. Western Digital also makes good drives. I use Seagates in most of the computers I build for friends and they've always commented on how quick the drive access is and how quiet the computer is. Maxtor (owned by WD I believe) is the brand that I've had the worst luck with.

But I agree with the above comment that if you have a good backup drive then your choice of hard drives is less important (go for low cost), provided that you back it up religiously.

Michael

Rocstor. They are fast, reliable and MAC compatible which is why you see them being used in many of the recording studios.