External Hard Drive

I use Western Digital Red drives in my NAS and knock on wood it's been 4 years and not a failure. I have not tried one of their external drives so can't comment there but they make good products. And buy the 8TB I bought 4TBs myself and am almost out of space now.

In the imaging production environments where I used to work we relied on Seagate drives. I don't know that they're superior to Western Digital but those are the two well-regarded brands I'm familiar with. For an external storage drive where portability isn't an issue I would go with drives with their own internal power supply rather than USB.

I can’t use a NAS right now because the Naim Star doesn’t allow ripping to a NAS (only to an attached hardrive.  May set up a NAS later after I have ripped my cd’s.  

WD gold enterprise   hardcore server drives 8TB about 250.00

SSD are much more expensive but much quieter and more reliable.  Ripping music is a lot of work.  It stinks when the drive fails.  You should either have a pc, NAS or second drive to back up to, especially if not using a solid state drive.

If you are talking bare drives be careful to distinguish between application types. My WD Green drives work well for my PCs application and WD Red Drives work well for my NAS Server Class application.
One decision is do I want long term storage possibly with backup or 
couldn't care less if the HDD frags ... 

Now I am thinking of splurging for a Naim Uniti Core and adding an internal drive it NAS to that.  So confused.  Any Naim people here?

rego,
This is all confusing to me.  I was planning on putting together a NAS with Raid 1 but then learned I couldn’t rip from the Naim Star to the NAS (only an attached hard drive).  I can add a Naim Core.  Very expensive and not sure if overkill and advantages.  I was things as easy as possible with a very friendly user interface.  I am not dumb at the least but all this is digital aspects is very hard to put together and understand (music stores, NAS, music cores, FLAC/Wav/..., Roon/Naim App, different types of drives,ripping, meta data aspects (many of my cds are limited edition Grateful Dead box sets/cd’s, lived band concert recordings (Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam, Allman Brothers, Dave Matthews...from the band issuances, Nugs, etc.) and some bootlegs.  My goal is to minimize my physical possessions (cd’s) keeping as hi res as possible and start acquiring as much digital downloads going forward as possible, ease of accessing a music library, integration with streaming service(s), back-up.

@davir1963, How did you get to realize this >>>

" learned I couldn’t rip from the Naim Star to the NAS (only an attached hard drive)"

<<< ... so that I can understand what it means in order to offer suggestions.

If it is possible to connect (interface) via USB to a NAS (because Unity does not use Ethernet) rips may be do able otherwise ripping with another device may be the only option and looking for an external Drive (using Laptop / Desktop).

No, Star has an Ethernet.  It just doesn’t allow you to rip cd’s directly to the NAS with its cd ripping ability; only can rip to an attached hard drive.  Other than that, it has no problem recognizing the NAS and all digital music stored on it.  So I would either have to find another way to rip the cd’s onto the NAS or rip to a hard drive (or thumb drive) attached to the Star.

Oh, I learned this from a Naim forum and it was verified by Naim.  Thinking of adding a Naim Uniti Core but would need to justify the cost with other benefits.

If you haven’t already done so, I would suggest that you try to obtain explicit confirmation that the Uniti Star can utilize a 4 TB or 8 TB drive.

I looked at the writeups on it at the Naim site, and while in the support section there is a Q&A on that point the "answer" is a non-answer:

What is the maximum size HDD/ flash drive that can be used with the Uniti Star?

1.Only USB sticks and BUS powered USB HDDs can be used — The larger the size the slower the performance if more music is stored on it.

Also, it is stated that up to 20,000 tracks can be stored on a local USB connected storage device. 20,000 tracks in Redbook format, averaging say 3 minutes each, total well under 1 TB.

Finally, I’m not sure why the quoted "answer" says "Only USB sticks and BUS powered USB HDDs can be used," which if stated accurately would appear to rule out the use of self-powered external drives. Although from a technical standpoint I can’t conceive of a reason why that might be.

Good luck. Regards,
-- Al