External hard drive for expanding iTunes library?

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.

Cytocycle, I haven't heard of ClarkConnect home Linux. I use mostly Ubuntu and Fedora distributions. If you're using hardware RAID, just about any distribution should work fine. And most distributions make it easy to configure software RAID, too.

Most motherboards have up to 4 SATA RAID ports (though some have 2 of them). If you want one contiguous volume rather than mounting two separate RAID systems on two separate mountpoints, then consider a RAID controller such as the following:

3ware 9650SE-8LPML PCI Express SATA II Controller Card

Good luck,

Michael

Sufentanil: Thanks for validating what I was leaning towards except for the cost. I know that is the 3ware card I would love to purchase (plus the $129 for the battery pack that makes it like 5 times faster in Raid 5, without risking write caching) but for a hundred more I can buy a 5 drive NAS chassis.. That's the problem...

I'm still trying to focus on how much space and how many machines I want in my house. (Currently 3 + TabletPC) And worse how many running 24/7.

I am thinking of converting one of my machines (P4 2.4Ghz with 1GIG of RAM) which only has 2 SATA150 ports to a linux server and buy two of the Promise 4 port 300 PCI Sata Cards ($46 each at newegg and linux drivers are available) and run software raid.

Thanks again for the suggestions.
Chris