Which hard drive for digital music server?

Hi,

I've built four servers for family and friends: I'd recommend against using the old IDE interface (in favor of SATA). I'd also suggest that you avoid the cheaper Maxtor drives (I used 16 200GB in these various machines and 4 have failed). Seagate's reliability has improved since the late 1990s.

The current HD server I'm building uses some capacious drives for storage in a RAID array, on the order of 2.5TB for storage.

For you, a next generation SATA with a greater amount of storage (say, 0.5TB) might be promising: there's a new 500GB 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda available should you wish to accommodate future storage requirements.

In any case, the Barracuda 7200 series supports NCQ and 3GB/s throughput (about 3X the speed of first generation SATA) and is warranteed for 5 years.

If these specs are overkill for you, the 5400 series drives are good all-around performers, as well.

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.