Question about a music server

I have about 2000 cds on my MAC - lossless. These cds average about 300MB each. If your discs are similar than you should need about 210 gigs. I think that the max for a cd is about 800MB (over 80 min of music). At 800MB each you would need about 560 gigs.

That exactly what I have done. I use Mac-Mini with 1TB drive on firewire bus. I keep second 1TB backup at work in case of fire, burglary etc. I use free program MAX that ripps exact copies, gets covers and puts it into Itunes in Apple Lossless format. Each CD holds about 500MB on average. Compression is about 2x so you need 700x250MB=175GB - possibly slightly more beacuase of metadata and covers. My 1TB Fantom drives were $100-120 and you won't save much by going to smaller sizes.

I started my music server about a year ago. I seldom use my CD player anymore. I usually take time to rip a CD to disk first prior to listening. Sometimes, I'll just carve out a chunk of time (often while listening to my system concurrently) and use it to rip a bunch of titles to disk in advance all at one time.

I recently picked up a 1.5 Tb Seagate USb drive that has been just what the doctor ordered. Cost: $140 at Best Buy. Incredible! I'm coming up on about 5000 tracks ripped, which equates to few hundred discs I'd say (still a few hundred to go), and the 1.5Tb disk is only slightly used.

I plan to pick up another of the same 1.5 Tb drives soon to keep a backup on in that the other 500Gb backup drive I have will be filled at some point.