How to manage a big itunes library?

Dean - The OWC stuff is highly respected for using quality parts. My friend has a 500gig Mercury Elite Pro drive and it's pretty noisy so that's a downside to them. Other than that they are used by many photogs, as are G-Tech, for their reliability. I found the RAID solution that was recommended on the ASMP list (no direct experience myself): It is by Accordance Systems. As you know, us photographers are a pretty demanding lot when it comes to dependable storage/backup as our livelihood is on those spinning discs (this of course goes for many other occupations). When it comes to building hard drives definitely go with something that is well vented/cooled as has already been pointed out, and with a company known for using quality parts (controllers, power supply, etc.). Alternatively it is not that difficult to get all the parts and build your own with quality parts. Any way you do it, the drives will still eventually fail, it's just a matter of how long they last.

Marco

Another very tedious backup solution is to back up to dual-layer or single layer DVD's. That is best facilitated using a backup program that allows backup to multiple discs. If you have a library of of 5000 CD's that would take about 330 DVD's or half as many dual-layer (SLOW to burn) DVD's, and to restore your library would mean transferring those all back to another hard drive in the event of failure of the original copy. Still, it is yet another potential backup strategy for an additional hard-copy on fewer discs.

PS If you do backup to DVD, my calculations, I think, were for WAV files. If you use Apple Lossless or some other compression scheme you'd be using much fewer DVD's. Also, if you back up to DVD, I'd strongly recommend buying high quality media such as Taiyo Yuden, as opposed to most of the crap they sell at the mega-office warehouse stores, most of which is made in China, has poor lamination process and spotty reliability in burning. I've had half a cake-pak of those type of CD's fail to burn. YMMV, but I always use Taiyo Yuden now and have had no problems at all. One can easily see the difference in lamination process in comparing a TY disc to the alternatives. Again, a tip from one whose backup is his livelihood. Genuine TY media is available from The Supermedia Store

Over the last three years, I've bought a lot of equipment from Other World Computing. Good people and good stuff!

I can definitely vouch for Taiyo Yuden DVDs and DVD-DLs as well. And, Mitsui for CDs.

The number of CDs I've ripped to Apple Lossless is only about 40GBs, so I don't have nearly the challenge Ejlif is faced with. A 250GB fanless hard drive might be a solution for me.

Ejlif, you may have to consider a small RAID system placed in a different location from your listening room.

Wow I was ready to pull the trigger on a 4TB Drobo. I only needed to find out if it was to noisy. Sounds like that idea may be out the window. Now it sounds like it isn't reliable. Damn someone needs to come out with a great big drive that is reliable. They'd get rich it sounds like.