External drives

The drive mechanism shouldn't have any effect on the quality of the playback. If the Samsung drive is working well I wouldn't spend any money on a different brand.

The more important consideration is whether you have a second drive to back up the primary one you use for playback. All hard drives fail, always, and always unexpectedly. They're very complex mechanical devices that operate at high speed within very fine tolerances. It isn't a question of whether they will fail, just when it will happen.

So if you don't have one already you definitely need another drive of the same or larger capacity as your primary drive and make regular backups. After years of helping manage technology at a large company I'm absolutely paranoid about backups. I have two backups of all my music and store one of them in a fireproof, waterproof box inside a locked safe.

Sorry if this sounds like a rant but I've had to hold the hand and try to be sympathetic with way too many people who lost all their data when a drive failed.

Sfar, I of course agree with your excellent comments. But I think that what she is referring to is the optical drive that is used for ripping, not to the hard drive that is used for storage and playback.

If so, IMO the answer depends on what ripping software is being used. If the software can guarantee bit-perfect ripping, I don't think there is any means by which the drive used for ripping can make a difference with respect to subsequent playback of the ripped file from a hard drive.

Although it would be a completely different story if the CD were being listened to while being directly played back in real-time from an optical drive, either in a computer or in a CD player.

The OP may find this thread to be of interest.

IMO. Some other opinions will certainly differ.

Regards,
-- Al

Thanks Sfar and Almarg. When I began ripping several months ago, I was using iTunes and I did have a back up drive. One day I mistakenly deleted everything that I had so far imported. A lot of music. I thought that I'd be OK because of the backup. Well, the drive was a lemon and I lost everything. The silver lining to all
of this is that I'm now using XLD (wasn't aware of it until now) and I have a new external backup. XLD sure is slow but I know the reward will be worth the time. Now back to ripping with the Samsung. Thanks again.

On that backup thing. After my first external drive died I went a little backup crazy. I use a 2 TB Western Digital MyBook II external drive. It has two internal 1TB hard drives. Using the software that came with the drive, the device is programed for RAID 1. To my understanding each, the internal drives is mirrored, one drive goes the other is, with any luck is ready to go. I also have a 2nd external drive configured the same as the WD drive is and I use "Carbon Copy Clone" software to made a clone backup. Yeah, I know it's overkill but loading 2000+ CD's is a pain.