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External hard drive for expanding iTunes library?

My hard drive is nearly full and I need to get an external HD for my rapidly expanding music library. I use iTunes and stream the music to my Airport Express to my Marantz SR-7200's DAC . Using a bel-canto eVo 6 and Gallo Ref 3's makes good music to me. All my music files are Aiff(uncompressed) and currently use 106GB. I've read good reviews online about the G-DRIVE 500GB External Hard Drive but I'm curious if any other Audiogoners have used it or could recommend other large,quiet and reliable external hard drives. My computer is an iMac G-5.
Thanks for any help.
Howell
hals_den
sufentanil's avatar
sufentanil
782 posts
 
Cytocycle, why do you need to have up to 8 drives? That's the constraint that's causing it to be more expensive. You won't find an NAS with >4-5 drives at a reasonable price point. Commercial RAID racks are going to start in the couple thousand dollar range. The 3ware card is actually about your least expensive option given that constraint. If you are willing to be limited to 4 drives (1.5 TB using 4 500 GB drives in RAID 5), then try something like:

Tekram TR-834A PCI-X 133MHz/64bit SATA II Controller Card

I would advise against software RAID, because it's more difficult to configure and to recover, as well as being slower.

Michael
cytocycle
1,043 posts
 
Michael,

Thanks, I need 5-6 drives (750gig drives.) I already have 2.2 TB of space (JBOD) and need to expand that. The Thecus 5200 supports 5 drives for $635.

I know the dangers of software raid, but actually O'reilly books are now suggesting software raid for linux. If I go hardware I'll go 3ware (as I've had friends with LSI logic chipsets fail...and they were not recoverable).

I was a Network admin for 9 years so I'm very familiar with hardware versus software raid of the past. I have a PCI-X LSI logic Raid card but no server motherboard for it.
I'm probably going to go Raid 0 and backup eSata to another external device... to maximize space and protect against other losses and actually have a backup offline.
Chris
rbstehno
1,552 posts
 
for music servers, i would recommend a raid 5 setup because it is faster reading the disk. you do pay a penalty on writes, but so what if the ripping of a cd takes another few seconds or minutes. when the music is played back, i want the fast access.
herman
2,290 posts
 
Speed is not an issue. Even the slowest hard drive in the world is way fast enough for music playback.
cytocycle
1,043 posts
 
Since this old thread got updated, I went with the Thecus 5200 Pro with 5 750gig SATA Seagate drives in a RAID 5 configuration. So I have 2.7 Terrabytes of usable space which is already filled. This NAS is 2-3 times faster than moving files from a MS windows box, it's truely amazing getting 30% utilization on a gigabit interface... When 1TB drives drop in price I will switch to those. The 1.5Ghz Processor and the 512meg of Ram are plenty fast to run the latest version of Slimserver with MySQL.

To backup my Nas I have a PC which will be running FreeNas or MS Windows Home Server running JBOD via the OS.

As Herman pointed out that the slowest setup is still no problem for music playback.
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