which external hard disc for music storage?

Get a 750G or 1T. You will fill it up faster then expected. Noise and reliability are the two main issues. LaCie is good but I heard that some of the models (the ones designed by F.A. Porsche and shape like an aluminum brick) have overheating problem. I like the older Seagates. They are quiet and reliable. The newer FreeAgent series are just as good but Seagate added a strip of amber light running from the top of the case to the bottom, very distracting because it is bright and it blinks.

I have also had good luck with the Porsche Design drives by LaCie.

The larger the drive, greater is the chance of disaster. I think anything over 500G/7200rpm is risky. Better to start an array, in a cabinet that can support at least eight drives. These cabinets are not that expensive and you can add drives as you expand your music collection. Do compressed backups to a spare 750 drive. Like financial investments, best to 'not put your eggs' in one basket.

Hi -

A couple of issues no one has touched on. First - heat is the enemy of drives - a fanless enclosure is one way to limit the useful life of the drive - despite the claims that the clever Porsche engineers used the natural convection of aluminum blah blah blah.

Throughput is really not an issue. USB1.1, USB2, Firewire 400 & 800 and SATA (my preference) will all do the job. If you can go SATA by adding a PCI card I highly recommend it - robust, rock solid and much faster when it comes to making backups.

Ahhh - backups. If you have 400Gb+ you definitely need a backup drive. I don't like to store compressed. A restore takes much longer. Also I like to rotate the drives - as I update the backup it becomes the primary. Spreads the wear.

As you probably know, you will not get the rated capacity of the drive. For instance a 500Gb drive actually only delivers about 470Gb usable storage. For that reason alone I would buy a 750 or 1T. I would use this drive (and the backup) solely for your music library. That makes backing up much simpler. Drives of this size will usually have 16mb caches which will also improve performance

Basic rules of filling up drives. Try to keep your boot drive to <50% capacity. The rest of the drives at or below 80%. Especially if you have a PC this allows room to do a defrag (or Maintenance) on a Mac.

The other big reason to buy bigger drives at this point is that the cases, trays etc are also expensive.

The key to good drive life is to buy good drives. Do not buy consumer drives. Buy enterprise drives for a few bux more - you can tell because they will have 3-5 year warrantees based on a much higher MTBF. In this size range these will usually be bare drives that need to be installed in a case, tray or inside the tower. The drives in cases with USB ports etc are not necessarily bad but I would compare all the specs carefully before I bought one.

Newegg is a great place to shop for this quality gear and they are inexpensive. They have a nice selection of 750s under $200/ea

If you have a home network or are planning one, and don't want to be tied down by cables, it's the only way to go.