External hard drive for expanding iTunes library?

Scratch my previous post's solution. It would work if the HD was internally mounted in an Apple G5...a quiet drive. But, it will NOT work with the two enclosures mentioned...the hard drive is SATA and the enclosures are compatible with ATA drives only. SATA enclosures are expensive so I'll need to find a quiet ATA drive.

Go on newegg.com. SATA is now standard. I checked. They have 81 different external enclosures for sale for a 3.5" drive, with some inexpensive ones for less than $40. Please let us know how it works out for you and what you think about the noise level.

Cytocycle, I found the link you provided interesting. I don't have the Thecus N5200, but I have the N4100 at home and it appears that they run at vastly different speeds. My N4100 gives 1/10 the performance of the N5200 according to their data.

My impression of my Thecus N4100 is this. The only thing that went easily was installing the drives. That went without a hitch. But then I had a terrible time configuring it. I sent an e-mail to Thecus and got a cryptic response back. I ended up upgrading the firmware, and things got better after that, well, once I figured out a peculiarity of the two network jacks and their default network addresses. The bottom line is that it wasn't the easiest thing to set up, and it's slow as molasses. I use it for backups because it's too slow to be used for anything else. Maybe the newer N5200 has fixed many of these problems?

That's why I now advocate home-built NAS solutions. It's about the same price, and you can spend just a few dollars for an Ubuntu Linux DVD and it's all the software purchase you'll have to make. And it's MUCH faster for me. You can also use it as your web server, router, firewall, etc. Add to that the possibility of automated remote backups and you can see why I much prefer this option.

Michael

Cyctocyle, thanks for the informative post. Do you know anything about how the new USB share drive on the Apple Airport Extreme will work with a MAC system? It seems like you could connect multiple large USB drives to an Airport Extreme and create a pretty inexpensive remote, wireless hard disk server for music, since it doesn't require high speed.

Morris: Sorry not to familiar with the airport extreme. When I looked at doing that, the sound quality out the toslink on the Airport Express was not up to the same quality as other options (aka SB3). But easy of use and setup are of course easy. www.audiocircle.com has some posts on the airport express systems.

Sufentanil: I am going to try ClarkConnect home linux which I've heard is really easy for setting up raid, on one of my systems on a spare drive, plus it is meant to be run headless with a web ui. My next step is finding either a motherboard with 8 Sata connectors or a couple of Sata 4 port cards that are linux compatible. I will be running 5+ drives.