Planning ahead - music storage

[tracymort]

Ok this is my set up..in my main PC I have 2 hd's one is only 40gig..thats the main PC part and way too small. I also have 120gig on which my music is stored. It's nearly full (we ripped all our cds onto it, pc plays the music through our main amp etc)..now what's best to do next? Firstly it needs backing up..secondly we need more storage. I have to have access to all my music at once! I've been looking at external hd's. I just can't decide what to do as I know in a few years that'll be full too (and need backing up too). Any suggestions?

[fly258]

I'm amazed your 120 gig drive is nearly full. You must have either an enormous music collection or you have ripped your CDs in WAV format.

I would suggest keeping your music collection on a hard drive MP3 player as a back up but I think the biggest one available it only about 100GB.

I have about 800 albums stored on my MP3 player, my D drive on my PC and as even more back up on another hard drive, kept in a safe place.

My 800 albums only take up about 38 GB. I would suggest you check to see what format and quality your music is stored on your hard drive and change it to MP3 if it is not already. 128 Kb should be good enough  as it is very close to CD quality.

 If, on the other hand, if your music is already stored as MP3 files then you have one of the biggest music collections ever and I wouldn't mind a browse through it ;-)

[fo3nix]

yes, my suggestion would be to rip your CDs to either some high-quality lossy format like AAC, or a non-lossy format like apple's format or (perhaps better), FLAC.

as for storage, how about having two large hard drives with a RAID-2 configuration (1 or 2, I always get confused. the mirrored drive setup). This will greatly minimise data loss.

If you want it for long-term, then get some hard drives that will only be half full now with your current data (assuming this data is in AAC/FLAC, depending on your preference for how you want to store the music).

[fo3nix]

knew I'd get it wrong! RAID-1 is disk mirroring.

[tracymort]

Thank you! We do really have that much music..most is mp3..we did do mp3 pro for a bit (until i got an ipod that is). We own about 2000 physical cd's and then some that we've downloaded in the past 3 years!