External Drive Help

Zd542, I disagree with the blanket statement that WD are unreliable. They make some great drives (as does Seagate). The key understanding is that all hard drives will fail eventually.

Consequently, an automated backup solution IS A MUST. I recommend Crashplan, which has unlimited backups to locally-connected drives, drives on your friends' computers (encrypted so that they can't see your data), and online at Crashplan's central data storage. They have unlimited data storage plan; I have easily 3-4 TB backed up on their servers (and my other computers in my private network).

I would invest the time to have a solid backup strategy before sinking any more money or time into music downloads or CD rips. It will pay dividends in the future, as you've just learned.

Michael

Rlwainwright, most of the reputable cloud backup services offer options to "seed" the data on their system from a hard drive that you send them, and to send you a hard drive with data for restore. So you can skip the sometimes month-long process of backups over a slow Internet connection for Terabyte-quantity data.

Generally, though, this involves a fee (I've often seen between $100 and $200). But you have to factor in the value of your data, such as how much money you spent on the CD's and what your time was worth spending hundreds of hours over the course of years ripping those CD's. So it could easily be money well spent to provide another layer of protection to your data.

As a former computer professional and long-time audio enthusiast, my best advice to someone either already into computer audio or just starting out in it are:

1) Start with a multi-faceted backup plan. This means local and offsite backups. In my opinion, they should be automated (to ensure that they get done, and get done frequently). Crashplan and similar services (Mozy, Carbonite, etc) make this easy.
2) Understand that RAID (1/5/6/10) DOES NOT MEAN PROTECTION FROM MOST DATA LOSS SITUATIONS. It protects against ONE thing only: The loss of a single hard drive. And that assumes you can detect it and replace it in a timely fashion.
3) Use commercial-grade drives. For bang for the buck, I recommend Western Digital's SE drives. I've had several operating continuously for several years. I also use WD's RE3 and RE4 drives. Not cheap, but I've also never had one fail. Seagate has some nice drives, too. Check Newegg reviews and you'll find the drives that are the reliable workhorses.
4) BE ORGANIZED. This means having a consistent way of tagging the data from the start (especially important with Classical music, as that's still rather challenging to deal with, since much of our software and tags seem to be more designed for pop music).
5) Stay flexible. Don't start using a proprietary method for storing your data that can't easily be adapted to other software. This is where FLAC is very useful, as it's (almost) ubiquitous; the major exception is iTunes.
6) Don't lose sight of why you're doing this. Sit back, relax, and let the computer discover songs in your collection that you've forgotten about and never would have thought to play. Enjoy the ease with which you can select music to play, and even play throughout the house.

Michael