configured as RAID 5, so its pretty safe. If I blow up two drives at once, guess I'm reripping everything, but that prospect seems pretty minimal
I think it's just a question of time before computer storage makes CD/transport systems obsolete, but I'm not sure the technology is quite there yet. I use very expensive RAID5 systems in my work and have had 4 of them fail (3 because 2 drives failed at the same time, and 1 because the RAID5 hardware failed). Streaming music is much less data intensive than my work, but consumer RAID5 systems are probably much less robust too, so I would not be surprised if some people will be dealing with RAID5 failures and re-ripping all their CDs. RAID6 might help, but when I switch to a computer system I might use a single large HD, with a second disk as a backup, just to keep it simple.
I like the idea of using a computer based system, but I also like the simplicity of the CD/transport, and if CD is very close to the quality of a computer system I'd be happy to stay with the CD/transport until computer based systems are perfected and made relatively simple, hopefully that will be soon. For people who like playing with hardware and software I think computers are the way to go now - for me that still feels too much like being at work.
Another point - Steve Nugent is developing computer audio systems that avoid the conversion from I2S to SPDIF, when that's ready it might be another good reason to go with computer based systems.
