Which hard drive for digital music server?

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.

RAID 5 is actually a bit more efficient--you only "lose" one of the four drives. Think of it like this--Drive A gets data X, drive B gets data Y, drive C gets data Z, and drive D gets X+Y+Z. If drive A goes bad, you recover the data by performing drive D-drive B-drive C. Similar for the other drives. Actually kind of cool. Given the time its taken to rip all my CDs, I use RAID 5 and highly recommend it.

Hi Ed -

Curious why you decided to go this route. No argument about the time spent ripping, but why not just do a one for one back up every so often (say monthly or everytime you add 'n' amount of data, and save the cost of at least two drives?

Or even do a real back-up which is to say store the data off premises?

Raid systems are very good at providing redundant type protection, but your data is still stored in one physical space. It won't protect against fire, electrical damage or other acts of god. If you're really serious about protection you'll store your backup(s) in different physical locations. Personally, I think you're better off having data saved in two distinct locations than have a single RAID setup.

Its all a balance of risk versus harm. In an ideal world, I could just ftp the drive contents to a remote data vault on the 'net. My investigations indicated that solution was a pretty freekin' expensive way of doing it...

I know RAID 5 doesn't protect against catastrophic failure in the sense of a house fire, lightning strike, etc. (I do have offsite photos of my gear/software for insurance). But, I'm not sure that was my issue.

The problem that I was running into was the lack of reliability of large consumer drives. My original idea was just to get four 250 GB drives and use a pair for backups. I'd rip enough to fill up one drive, copy the drive, and move to the next one. Figured I could add more pairs as time went by and locate one set offsite. Well, I had one drive crash before I had even filled it up. That caused me to double check the other three, and I found bad sectors on all of the others. This, on top of a prior crash of a 250 GB drive, and I started wanting something a little more engineered. The RAID server I bought is a NAS built for 24/7 commercial operation--a Dell Powervault 745N. Hasn't hiccupped in the time I've operated it (its been on fulltime).