Are all external hard drives the same?

Whoops, I meant Tb, not Gb above.

Sorry.

I use Hitachi Ultrastar 1Tb drives and have had excellent results with them.

I know that many VERY large cloud storage companies (which I won't name but guarantee that you have heard of) use these which speaks volumes to me.

I've got two Lacies: attractive aluminum cases, fanless, pretty quiet, south of 200 bucks for 2TB, maybe well south, depending on model. Purchased from Amazon @ competitive prices.

Whatever you do, I'd rip my material to two drives, and keep one off site (say at work). This is a pretty cheap way to ensure not having to repeat a lot of ripping labor if there's a failure.

Some people use RAID arrays for redundant storage, but for audio, this doesn't buy you much. You will be up and running immediately if you have a drive failure, but this is not very important for a hobby, and having a RAID doesn't protect against "environmental" failures like fire, flood, children, pets, and theft.

John

John, good point about a RAID array of multiple drives not being something that should be counted on as an exclusive means of backup. Some additional reasons:

1)If the RAID controller circuitry fails at some point in the future, and if the same or a similar controller is no longer available, for RAID modes other than RAID 1 (simple mirroring) the data may be unrecoverable even if all of the drives are intact.

2)Although unlikely, it is certainly within the realm of possibility that all of the drives in the array could be simultaneously destroyed or corrupted by the power supply going into an overvoltage condition (although a *good* design will include effective protections against that possibility); by misbehavior of the controller circuitry due to undiscovered design bugs; or by misbehavior of software or firmware due to undiscovered design bugs, crashes, malware infections, etc.

Regards,
-- Al

RAID technology in a single storage device provides storage redundancy to provide high or constant availability in teh case of certain hardware failures.

Its good stuff but not a good fit for most home users IMHO. Having a physical backup drive is the single best protection for home use. Having a backup at a separate location from the main is the best solution in case fire or other localized disaster is a concern.

If a main fails, the backup can be switched in easily with some but little downtime. Most business applications that use RAID cannot afford ANY down time.

To accomplish that, data is replicated or backed up to additional devices that can be switched in quickly if needed.

RAID alone adds cost and little value for a home user.