Ripping 700 CD's to HD using FLAC-How much space?

Chris74,

I have a large collection of FLAC, which I keep on DVD+RW disks. You can make use of my statistics: I have currently 1146 albums and they are stored on 93 DVD+RW disks. It means that 1 DVD disk contains on average 12,3 albums. One DVD disk can store 4482 Mb, it means that one album on average occupies 364 Mb.

If you rip your 700 CDs into FLAC, you will need, based on my experience, 249 Gb. This figure will be 10-20% bigger if your albums are hard-to-compress music genres (hard rock, black metal, etc.) Also, this figure will be 10-20% less if you listen primarily to easier-to-compress styles (soul, jazz, voice, a capella, etc.)

I hope it helps.

Regards,
Evgeny K.

Evgeny, Thanks for the insight in regards to the amount of space you have used on your FLAC DVD-RW storage disks, that really helps shed some light on ways to store the media using a "hard back up" method other than keeping the original disks. Speaking for myself, storing (roughly) 75 DVD-RW disks would take up far less space than 700 disks with covers, no doubt about it!

FLAC compression is like a "zip" file on a computer - it is a lossless way of storing data with mathematical formulas instead of the raw data of the wave form. This is different from .mp3 compression that actually eliminates data points and relies on an algorithm to draw a new wave form. In FLAC compression, the higher the compression, the more time the processor will take to "unzip" the file.

However, once "unzipped" the raw data is the same as the original wave form, regardless of the compression level.

I'd also point out using Firewire or eSata as an interface if you have it. Moving data around is a pain once you have it ripped. Many drives have quad interfaces now (USB2, FW400, FW800, eSata). I'd also use 1TB drives and fill them at most 2/3. Data access speed drops dramatically as the drive gets filled. I have a 1TB drive that is full that crawls even on eSATA. Faster throughput helps for backup, copying etc. And as other have mentioned, drives will fail - so being able copy quickly prior to that event is worthwhile.

Is there a way to convert AIFF to FLAC easily?