Which hard drive for digital music server?

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

Hopefully something cheaper will be available by the time I'm maxed out... ;)

I'm also not sure, but I may be able to get a fiber channel upgrade and a relatively "dumb" expansion case to string more drives together.

Then again, spending $3.5K on a high reliability NAS doesn't seem that offensive when you consider other high end audio gear. FBOW, it is less than I've spent on many other major components for my stereo. Even with a conservative $10 per CD, its also a lot cheaper than the 1200 or so CDs that are ripped to it. Its all about how much you value the time that it took you to rip all the CDs... I never wanna do that again.

I would observe, however, that I'm not the looniest in the asylum here. I seem to recall one member having purchased a maxed out xServe RAID, configured with seven 400 GB drives per side--6 for RAID 5 with one hot standby (about 4 TB of total storage, taking into account both sides).

I can see from the comments above why this hobby is sometimes considered a disease (audiophilia). Working as a data network engineer for 11 years now, I see no need to have a RAID 5 system in a home audio setup. Why would you want such a rapid recovery of data in a home environment where there are no customer service issues to deal with? Why would you want to keep your PC on 24/7 if you are not running a music/TV studio?

Just buy one extra external HD for backup. If you are paranoid, buy a third HD and keep it at your Mom's house (or better yet, at the Federal Reserve Bank!). Remember your CDs also count as a backup set.