Apple Lossless vs iTunes Plus

Ckorody - it is only in the ads that Agon does not allow hyperlinks. You don't need to fly stealth in the forums:

Newegg
Outpost

Terabyte drives have a reputation of being slow and unreliable and are usually two or more 500gb platters/drives housed in a single box. I work in photography and graphic arts and no one uses those drives as reliable backup because of that reputation. Is your library really that large, or are you backing up other stuff as well? I'd suggest a mirrored RAID solution like this one (about $369 street) where you can swop out the SATA drives very easily and inexpensively. There are other options in that same price bracket as well. My friend has been using this one for about 6 months and is so far very happy with it. I'm still doing a mirrored back up manually with two separate 500gb drives.

Correction; a 1TB Rocraid is currently just under $300 at Amazon They also have a 1.5TB and 2TB version for not much more $.

Blindjim - I got this Lacie drive for $99 when they had a special. The regular price is $119 but this vendor and almost all the other sites are constantly offering daily or weekly specials.

The sites I've found best to deal with are:
http://newegg.com
http://www.buy.com/
but you should also check out
http://frys.com/
http://www.tigerdirect.com/

A good way to find deals is to check these sites when you're in the market for something:
http://www.techbargains.com/
http://dealmac.com/
http://dealnews.com/
Techbargains has pretty good search functionality. Many sites like newegg and buy.com have newsletters that list whatever they're selling cheaply

I wasn't aware of any reliability issues with 1 terabyte drives but either smaller capacity drives or a RAID array are certainly great solutions, as Jax2 recommends.

Apple Lossless vs iTunes Plus
Any audible difference between the two? I only buy/import from CD's in Apple Lossless but I would like to stop buying CD's.
Sakahara

Sakahara, It is very easy to use your CDs to test the iTunes Plus 256 kbps AAC encoding. Just change the Import Setting preference when ripping your CD and when importing choose "Don't Replace"

Whether there is an audible difference will depend on *your* music playback system, and *your* hearing ability. Do try a test with a few different songs. I found with certain songs it is very difficult to tell. Some listeners systems have such high fidelity and acute hearing that they are able to tell the difference like it was comparing wine to water.

cheers, ed

I didn't know what iTunes + was at first (thought it was another garbage compression codec like MP3, only slightly better), and once I found out I realized I could import my CD's with AAC to compare. I was curious to hear others opinions though.

My system is very resolving, hearing too, so I will probably notice a difference.

Regarding storage of iTunes Library on external drive; I thought of this too. Wouldn't there be access issues, even with FW800, compared with the system drive? Maybe use NAS instead? It is more sensible though, especially since mine is larger then my system capacity - 140 GB and counting.