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

Allow me to ask another question. If you've got 700 cds you can fit them on a terebite drive without any compression and still have room for hundreds more. So why deal with compression? Unless you buy new music at a truly maniacal pace, by the time you outgrow the drive space, drives will be bigger and cheaper. Your time is probably worth more than the drive space you'll save.

Zowie:
It's a valid question for sure. Why not save everything as .wav (uncompressed) files?

There are a couple of reasons besides saving space that I use flac:
- The wav format doesn't have any set of agreed-upon ways to store metadata. I always seem to lose metadata whenever I convert from one format to another, or switch from one player to another when I use it. That's not an issue for flac or aiff or wma.

- I think Squeezebox transmits everything in flac format, so it's helpful to have it already compressed so it doesn't have to compress it while streaming.

- Drives are getting cheaper, but bandwidth is not necessarily keeping up. I use a small Passport USB drive at work which at 500Gb can hold all my CDs for now. My music skips a bit if I do anything else that accesses that drive while I'm listening. Using flac cuts the data rate in half or so versus .WAV files, which lowers the USB contention on my laptop, and makes my drive happier.

Regards,
Jonathan

Cnet has list of MP3 players that play FLAC.Highend seems to me Cowon and good buy is Sansa though video display is not up to snuff you can add micro SD cards and all are cheaper for what they do then Apple.Cowon really is head to head with more expensive Ipod Touch for wifi and all that.
Chazz

Get two of these 1TB drives:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136313

These are enterprise class drives and are supposed to be a little more reliable than the consumer grade drives known as Caviar Black.

You should make your main file storage drive the drive that does not contain your operating system and keep the backup files on your main system disk. Why? Well for one thing the main system disk gets used more and therefore is more likely to fail. Also, proper computer maintenance requires a reformat of the hard drive and clean reinstall of the operating system once or twice a year to wipe out viruses, corruption, ect. So you don't want long term file storage on that disk.

Either AIFF or Flac are fine. Do not use Apple Lossless, the sound quality is vastly inferior, I don't care what anyone says. Flac and AIFF sound the same to my ears, but Apple Lossless has a sound. Wav is not an option because of the lack of tags. My next MP3 player will be FLAC compatible for sure.

Thanks everyone for your posts. I wound up with a 1TB HD (plenty of space left on the drive) and everything has been converted to FLAC. Many albums on the new HD in FLAC format need to be transferred to CD-R. What would be the best and easiest way to do this?