Mini-Mac Server as an NAS

No, do not make a RAID with mixed internal and external drives. It won't work. Software RAID requires all drives in the RAID set to start up within a short period of time which is very difficult to do with external drives. As soon as one external drive didn't power up in time, that drive would be considered damaged and the RAID set would be in degraded state. I have tried it before. It is very massy. Don't do it.

4TB: Wow, you got quite a music collection! Let us know how long it takes to rip that much music.

I have a couple of thousand CDs. Some of these are SACD and DVD-A and I won't be ripping these but I would like to get rid of the bulk of my collection so that I don't feel like I am living in a CD warehouse. I figure 4 TB will handle the collection and leave enough room for new acquisitions.
I kind of expect that the ripping process will take a few years, during which time I can reconnect with a lot of music that I haven't heard in a while.
What is "concancinated"?

Richard,
You can rip DVD-A discs and get the hi-rez PCM. Also, when Herman mentioned concatinated he's probably using software that acts as a "volume manager". Multiple drives can be used to present one sum-of-the-parts big drive to the user. And usually you can add drives to make the volume bigger over time.

If you plan to make a big volume of some sort and it will be over 2.2TB, make sure your O/S can handle it. I would think current Apple O/S can do it and Windows 7 can do it (and linux). And also be careful that there are new disks that are being sold now that use 4K physical sector sizes and use software in the drive to do 512 byte sector emulation for the O/S. Stay away from them. And I believe there are some type of "hybrid" drives out that have 4K sectors and somewhat large solid state caches to help overcome the performance degradation of 512 byte emulation when using physical 4K sectors. Stay away from them also.

larry

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Apple Osx disk utilities has functions built in to build disk arrays

From Mac disk utility help files

About concatenated disk sets

You can create a single, large disk from several smaller disks by creating a concatenated disk set, which is also called “Just a Bunch of Disks” (JBOD) or “spanning.” The concatenated disk set acts as one large disk with the combined capacity of all the smaller disks. You can increase the size of a concatenated disk set after it’s been created by dragging more disks to it using Disk Utility.

A concatenated disk set is helpful if you have a file, such as a database, that’s larger than any of your disks. It’s also useful if you need to create a mirrored or striped RAID set with one large disk and two smaller disks.

If all the disks in the RAID set are about the same size, consider using a striped RAID set. A striped RAID set lets you access your data quicker.

Be sure to back up your data frequently. If any one of the disks is damaged, you will lose the data that’s on all the disks.

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