I bring drive home every time I feel it needs to be updated. I alternate drives remembering which drive was updated last. I decide to update when I add more than 10 CDs. In worst case when I loose original drive and one backup I can be 20 CDs behind but that's not bad.
Now That You've Ripped Your Entire Collection...
~
So, you've ripped your entire collection of CDs to the hard drive, and you're blissfully streaming music for hours without having to fetch the silver discs. Everything was transferred with 'bit perfect' perfection.
What did you do with your collection of physical media?
If you've kept the CD collection, why?
If you got rid of the collection, why?, and what did you do with it?
Trying to make a decision here.
So, you've ripped your entire collection of CDs to the hard drive, and you're blissfully streaming music for hours without having to fetch the silver discs. Everything was transferred with 'bit perfect' perfection.
What did you do with your collection of physical media?
If you've kept the CD collection, why?
If you got rid of the collection, why?, and what did you do with it?
Trying to make a decision here.
- ...
- 60 posts total
Larry, just buy an external hard drive having an interface that can connect to one of your home computers, such as USB, Firewire, or eSATA. Connect it to one of those computers, that can access the NAS, and use the computer to copy the files from the NAS to it. Then simply store the drive at another location, such as your office, and bring it home from time to time to copy newly ripped files onto it. One caution in selecting the drive is that older operating systems, such as Windows XP, will have problems working with drives that are larger than 2 TB (or more precisely, larger than 2.19 TB). Before you finish ripping your 4000 CDs you'll probably find yourself exceeding that size. If you are using XP, or a Mac OS that pre-dates Tiger (which was released in 2005), you would want to get multiple external drives that are each 2 TB or less, rather than anything larger. NewEgg.com is a great place from which to buy these and other kinds of computer accessories and parts. Here is a link to their listings of 300+ external hard drives, which you can narrow down to suit your requirements using the guided search feature at the left of the screen. Be sure to note the "More Options" link in that feature. Best regards, -- Al |
I had initially picked up a 2TB Raid-1 (redundant) drive for the music library, but I moved it out for two reasons: First, the fan was too noisy for a music system, and as Kijanki mentions above, the redundancy won't help if you have a fire, theft, or other calamity. Raid-1 only helps if your 'primary' drive in the cabinet goes down; that's when the mirror will kick in. So, I bought two identical 2TB drives that I knew were very quiet. I'm ripping my collection to the 'primary' drive, and I occasionally use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone that 'primary' drive to the 'secondary'. I do this whenever I've ripped enough CDs that I wouldn't want to lose the time and effort. The second drive, once cloned, goes down the street to a friend's house. Then, of course, there's the hardcopy backup in the physical CDs. I just don't know where I'm gonna put the darned things... square footage is hard to come by around here. |
Should have mentioned in case anyone's interested: The quiet drive mentioned above is an OWC Mercury Elite-Al Pro, available from macsales.com. It's about the quietest drive I've ever heard. Carbon Copy Cloner is a great program that allows you to clone exact copies of one drive to another. It's great for the music libraries, or routine system maintenance. It runs on a Mac... don't know if there's a PC version, or not. |
- 60 posts total