Best external hard drive to store PC ripped music

Peter,

The short answer to your question is "not likely". Ideally the Time Machine drive should be significantly larger than the data to be backed up, because Time Machine keeps interval backups after the first one that allows you to go back in time and see how the data looked at a given moment (before you make a particular change, for instance). The larger the Time Machine drive, the further back in time you can go, as it starts erasing old history when the drive fills up so it can continue to provide backups near the present time.

Michael

Peter, another thing: If you have a couple 1.5 TB drives around, get a RAID enclosure for 2 drives, put both of the drives into the enclosure and set it for RAID 0 (no redundancy, but you simulate a 3 TB drive). Then use this RAID as the time machine, so you will have a 3 TB Time Machine for 2 TB of data.

Michael

Drobo is much better, simpler, and easier than RAID, which I used to have.

Michael beat me to it, but I was going to suggest the OP get a RAID solution using it in Mirror mode. You would then have two or more duplicate copies of your music library. If one fails you pull the drive and replace it with a new one - the RAID system will automatically copy the remaining drive, creating a new duplicate. And so on. You can, of course, have more than one duplicate, but the RAID enclosure will become more expensive the more copies you have. They also tend to be more noisy than conventional drives (especially the cheaper models), requiring more cooling in larger housings. The other downfall is that this system does not maintain an off-site backup.

If you are simply looking for recommendations for external raw drives then Hitachi Ultra-Star's would be my pick. That said, any of them can fail, which is why back up is mandatory, IMO.

Drobo is much better, simpler, and easier than RAID, which I used to have.

I'm not sure I follow you here. Drobo is a brand. RAID is a technology. If you are using one of their arrays, AFAIK, that is just a mirrored RAID system. Not sure how it could be simpler than any other mirrored RAID system. The one I use requires no software at all and works entirely automatically. Two mirrored drives. If one fails a red light comes on and the other drive is put into use. Remove the bad drive, slide in a new one, and a brand new copy is automatically made on the new one maintaining a mirrored state. How is the Drobo array any simpler?