Which hard drive for digital music server?

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).

Certainly an elegant solution - what is your expansion strategy when you over run the available storage?

BTW - for the more casual reader - note that Edesilva's unit uses SATA drives - this is a far superior technology for adding drives than Firewire. If you use the enterprise level drives - offered by Maxtor and Seagate you will probably enjoy a high level of reliability at a bit less expense for a very modest increase in cost - check NewEgg. The Enterprise/Midline drives come with a 5 year warranty - the Seagate model is 7200.8 and the Maxtors are the MaXLINE III with 16mdb caches