assembling mac to dac rig


i have an older g4 ibook and a bel canto dac2. both old school, but i think i can cobble together a pc-based digital system w/ a firewire converter unit and a huge x h.d.

thinking of the M-Audio Firewire Solo as the mac-to-dac unit. not sure about the external hard drive, nothing fancy but must be 1tb or larger. don't do mp3, so it would have to be large to handle many lossless / redbook files. perhaps someone has some experience w/ "audiophile" hd's ...

any suggestions welcome, thanks.
midniter
I am just getting started along this path. I was using a G4 but it died. Upto that point it was working well. I bought two USB drives and configured them in a RAID 1 mirror configuration. Once it died I went with a mac mini and the same drives. If you can afford it you might consider firewire external discs in the sam configuration. 1 Terabyte should last you a while. I am using apple lossless. Some claim no compression is best but others can't hear the idfference. I have just ordered a M2Tech Hiface USB to SPDIF converter to run to my PS Audio DLIII. So far so good. Check out computeraudiophile for great information. Good luck!