External hard drive for expanding iTunes library?

For reviews of noise levels for various drives, check out www.silentpcreview.com. The comments on silentpcreview are consistent with what I've been saying. If you want a 500GB external drive, then it isn't going to be silent, even if it is fanless. It seems misleading, but silent to audiophiles is much different than silent or quiet in the computer products field. The quietest 3.5" drives appear to hover around 30dbA@1m, while the quietest 2.5" drives (laptop-sized drives) can be below 20dbA@1m, which is a huge difference. For a quiet drive near the listening position, the 2.5" drives are the best option. However, they max out at 160GB, so if your iTunes library is bigger than 160GB, you'll need to try one of the quieter 3.5" drives (which, for all I know, may include the G-Drive in the 500GB category). If you have a huge iTunes library and you have a wireless setup, then you could set up an iTunes library in another room or in an audio closet, using a cheap used Mac or PC connected to your wireless network.

For near field listening, I'm thinking about buying one of the quietest 2.5" models recommended by silentpcreview and using my G-Drive for backups and videos.

Mark

I’ll toss my 2 cents in.

Like some of you are discovering, HD can be loud. They can make all sorts of sounds, fan sounds, spinning up/down, chirps, beeps, clicks, etc.
I’d like to read the above referenced review on www.silentpcreview.com.
As far as fan cooling/no fan cooling for external HDs, there is no hard and fast rule. I have gone to fanless because I do not want the fan noise and have had no problems thus far. This latter doesn’t mean anything, as ALL drives will fail in time, it’s just a matter of when…so it must be backed up. A fanless vs. fan cooled HD also tells us little: the cooling all depends on how well the fan/ventilation passages/materials/vents have been designed…there’s a lot of very cheap poorly designed enclosures out there (both fan and fanless) and a low quality enclosure can also give up the ghost.

Oftentimes internal HDs will come with a longer warranty than their external counterparts. However (this was pointed out to me recently) do not put too much stake in big warranty claims, ex. ‘5 year warranty’, it will not do you any good anyway after the drive sh**s the bed; as for a warranty replacement HD 5 years from now…think back to the drive you bought 5 years ago (10GB, 20GB, 60GB??) …5 years from now the drive you buy today will be boarderline, if not completely obsolete, based on HD capacity and features in the year 2012…hard to predict the demands of a music library hard drive 5 years from now, and I’d put money that you would not care to replace the HD you are using now, with an identical one 5 years from now.

IMHO RAID is overkill for a music server unless you have $$$ to burn. After you make changes to your music library, just back it up to another 1 or 2 HDs.

I’m ready to step up my iTunes and computer based music server from casual listening to more quality. I too am looking for a HD, a 500GB internal drive, which I will put into a well designed fanless enclosure. If anyone has a recommendation for a QUIET drive (speed isn’t an issue) please do post it.

I think we should really break this up into a discussion about sub 500GB collections and 1-2TB Collections and IT professionals versus Home users.

Different solutions work better.
Sub 500GB.. Direct attached Performance USB (slowest)/Firewire (Faster)/eSata (eSata ROCKS!!!)

Sub 500GB.. Removing the noise from the room using a NAS
There are a couple of single and double drive NAS's that are cheap but transfers to them and from them are slow but for listening to music this is not important. Some even support 2 drives for Mirroring (Raid 1)

Edesilva: +1 for a NAS solution as he has a large collection.
I could build a PC or use on of my old ones but as soon as your collection reaches a certain size other options make sense. Stuffing 5 drives into a PC case suddenly generates a lot of heat and requires big slow moving fans and isolation and a REAL Hardware RAID CARD $300+ not one of the built-in motherboard controllers that is a software raid card. (3ware is the company to go with for raid cards)

NAS - Advantages:
Newer Buffalo Terrastations have faster processors and you can get the 2TB (or 1.5 in Raid 5) from www.newegg.com for under $900. You can add more ram to the Buffalo and performance will increase. If you run it in Raid 0 speed will increase if that is important but then you need another backup solution which as has been already recommended is a requirement (last thing I want to do is rip another 1000CD’s again lossless, my time is worth more)

Thecus N5200 ($640 from Newegg) plus Drives is the solution I'm looking at because it supports 5 drives! (Since raid 5 takes one drive space away for parity)
Yes it costs as much as a PC, but buying a real raid card costs almost as much as the Thecus. The Thecus N5200 uses under 100watts of power versus a pc with a 500watt powersupply. This unit uses a Celeron M 600Mhz Processor (a single jumper can make it run at 800mhz) and can be upgraded from 256 to 512mb of ram. It has gigabit and it is 2-3 times faster than the Buffalo plus has a eSATA interface on the back for backing it up or expanding it is critical for me. I have an external 1TB eSATA Case I will use to backup my NAS and eSATA is smoking fast! The unit supports Gigabit Jumbo frames. I plan on starting with 3 750Gig drives (being pulled out of my Noisy fileserver) and using the expand function (of course while backing up to a bunch of smaller external drives periodically) to eventually hit 5 750gig drives (for 3TB of storage) which should let me do my whole collection.
Another advantage is not having to patch an OS every month, pay for OS licensing, Antivirus licensing... No one ever mentions the $140 for a software OS license. I already have 4 PC's at home and don't need another one to patch each month and this NAS is going in a Closet in the guest bedroom on a UPS (remember if you are running RAID of any kind that PC or NAS had better be on a UPS (battery backup) unless you want a power glitch to corrupt your Raid (Recovery services$$$)

I intend to use the NAS as a central data repository for all my machines so my video content (Media Center), my 100gig of digital photography (grows by 20gig each time I shot my Digital SLR), and all working media documents are centralized and backed up on a schedule. This way all my PC in the house can have single drives to reduce noise, risk of data loss, reduce heat in the case and generally reduce my headaches of finding things.

Performance comparison of the Buffalo, Thecus, and Infant NAS
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/29616/75/1/8/
The Thecus is 2-5 times faster than the Buffalo in Raid 5 Gigabit due to the faster processor and design.

This site has some excellent articles on NAS versus build your own. The latest Thecus N5200 Bios Updates have fixed a lot of the problems discussed in the article since they reviewed the earlier one, but Infant has superior support compared to Thecus which you have to use the support boards. But once the unit is setup and working this is not a constant battle. Some of the smaller Thecus have iTunes support built in.

The interesting thing about all this is that the latest stuff almost requires the users to have some IT background, due to home networking, Permissions on SANS or remote servers, Backing up criteria, Configuring network cards and buying routers/switches that support jumbo-frames.

NAS's are typically Linux and require some configuration so if you aren't Techy, this might not be the right option.

Home built PC's once again might fit a price point but not necessarily an easy, quiet, or self maintaining solution.

MAC - Quieter, Lacking internal storage capacity (except for their high end machine$$$$) Require externally attached drives via USB/Firewire and some sort of backup process to additional external drives. Currently can go to up to 1TB of external storage for about $400 without raid (maxtor sells a 1TB two drive external drive) but these external chassis will be noisy. So wireless (Squeezebox, Sonos, Airport express) might require relocation of the machine out of the listening room.

I love the immediate access to my music collection and this causes me to listen more! So all this hardware is still cheap compared to the cost of my music collection or even a couple of cables..

Read the noise ratings on www.pcsilentreview.com. You'll find out that the 3.5" 500GB drives generally have significantly more noise than a 2.5" laptop hard disk (max. size is 200GB, but 200GB is very expensive, so realistically, you're maxed out at 160GB). There are some recommended 3.5" drives on the site, but from an audiophile perspective, I don't think you'll be very happy with them and they definitely aren't quiet. The recommended approach for an internal drive in a silent pc is to use a 2.5" laptop hard disk. If you want to purchase a drive and put it in an enclosure, check out www.newegg.com. They carry most of the drives recommended on pcsilentreview.

I have the fanless 500GB G Technologies G-Drive. There is no fan, but the drive spinning is noisy. I've gotten used to it and maybe it isn't a big deal for you, unless you like to listen to low-level classical music. I thought about buying a quiet 2.5" drive and putting it in an enclosure, but a 160GB or 200GB 2.5" drive isn't very large as a music server. Even a 500GB drive can only hold about 1000 CD's worth of music using Apple Lossless.

Here's one recommended solution. I haven't implemented it yet, but I plan to in the future. If you buy the new Apple Airport Extreme, it allows you to wirelessly hook up a USB hard drive. So you can buy a reasonably priced 1TB drive (plenty of room for a large iTunes library), hook it up to the Airport Extreme, and put it in a closet or a room separate from your listening room. Then, you have no noise problem and you have plenty of space for music. There are other side benefits from having a wireless server if you run multiple computers in the house. The overall cost is much cheaper than a silent solution in the room, which would require multiple 2.5" drives.

Also, you should consider backing up the server. If you do it right, you'd buy two hard disks, since you'll want to have one drive as a backup.

I've decided to go with a Western Digital Caviar SE16 (WD5000AAKS or WD5000AAKS) 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive. Noise etsts are here:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article617-page1.html

This drive can be bought for about $130 online.

For an enclosure I’ll drop it in a well made fanleess USB2/Firewire enclosure (I'll use the FW 400 connection on my Mac):

a)Mcalley 3.5in USB 2.0/1394 Aluminum Enclosure - PHR-100AC (about $39 online)

or a more expensive alternative:

b)OWC Mercury Elite-AL Oxford911+ FireWire & USB 2.0/1.1
(about $80)

At $180 shipped for the whole enchilada it comes to 36¢/gigabyte [if I'm correct, the breakdown cost is 15¢/digitized CD]. Of course, I have a drive for backup.

This is for a Macintosh based system. I have a G5 Desktop (also a G4 iBook) and the G5 is a pretty quiet machine, it has been in the room in which I listen to music and it doesn't distract me.