Which hard drive for digital music server?

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.

The new gen Seagates 7200.8 (not the old 7200.7) in 200Gb and up are considered to be the best by many. Have not seen the 500 released yet, but have a 400 dedicated to my iTunes library. 5 year warranty. Awesome - meaning I installed it and haven't thought about it since

The Maxtor Maxline with 16Mb buffer also carry a 5 year warranty and has NCQ 3 which is not implemented and is certainly not necessary for audio - it is basically a technology that speeds up disk access by prioritizing the calls among multiple client accesses - ie enterprise stuff. Both the Seagate and Maxtor drives are designed for the enterprise market, and are very quiet and very fast. The Hitachis are also very good. BTW if you keep them cool - meaning a case with a decent fan - you will extend their lives

SATA is totally the way to go. I could not be happier. If you are serious and your computer will handle it, get something like the Firmtek Seritek/1SE2
External Port SATA Host Card ($95), two drives and an enclosure. Look for MacGurus.com for a lot of great background - and fear not there is stuff for the PCs.

IMHO you do not need 15,000RPM UltraSCSI for audio. Very expensive and very small capacity. Audio files are small... this is not the barrier to decent performance. A slow processor, a fragmented drive etc are more likely culprits. If you want broadcast quality video editing, then you might want to consider it but there are less expensive SATA alternatives.

Chack out this company http://www.infrant.com/ and click on the latest news. One link talks about the prices, 1.6 TB for $2800, and the latest one talks about the ability to add RAID drives on the fly. Think I am going to have to check this one out.

Sten - Look at that site carefully - that is a RAID 5 package which is a redundant array designed for serious enterprise applications - essentially you are only getting one or two of the four drives worth of storage - the rest is redundant. Not in the least bit suitable for audio or video files.

What is nice about the piece is that it is NAS - meaning that you can hang this box on an ethernet network where it can be accessed without being attached to a computer.

If you want and need 1.5+ terabytes, go to Macgurus who will be happy to sell you just the thing for $1,774 using four Seagate 400s.