External hard drive for expanding iTunes library?

The 500 gig Western Digital external is routinely on sale for about $200 at big box and office supply stores.. I think Best Buy has it for that now.

Don't forget a backup. Your main drive will eventually fail and you must have a backup. This is not a possibility, it is a definite.

Heat is the enemy of hard drives. Unless it has a fan I would not get a box like Michael recommends. A sealed box is Ok for occasional backup use but if it is on all the time then it must be ventilated.

Michael, your advice runs contrary to everything I have ever read on this subject including advice from IT professionals. The difference in $ between running them in a well ventilated box versus the cheaper sealed ones is not much. Why would you want to tempt fate and go against conventional wisdom to save a few cents?

BTW I have taken a hard drive from a sealed external enclosure and it was much warmer than when I ran the drive outside the box. It is a well established fact that running them hotter than you have to shortens their life.

metal drive enclosures that are quite efficient at ducting heat away from the drive unit.

While I agree that some cases are better than others, it is indisputable that a drive will be warmer in a sealed box than in an enclosure that forces air across it.

If heat is the enemy of all electronic devices, which it most definitely is, it makes sense to run them as cool as reasonably possible.

I'm using eight 300 gig drives and had one of them fail recently after less than a year of use. I'm blowing some air across mine.

I agree with Edesilva that an NAS RAID array is a good way to go. If I had to do over I would go that route.

I think it is interesting that Michael has declared hard drives to be extremely reliable based on his experience and Edesilva has declared external drives to be inherently unreliable based on his. While I don't think either one has enough data based on these personal experiences to back up their claims about these devices as a whole, there is an overwhelming body of evidence that finds hard drives unreliable enough that it is considered foolish to operate without a backup.

It's also interesting to note that the actual hard drive in an external drive is exactly the same drive that is used internaly, the difference being the case, the interface (usb or firewire or ethernet) and the power supply which is usually a wall wart. If you visit Audio Asylum's PC forum you see many declarations supporting the idea that external drives are unreliable. But why should that be if they are the same drives used internally? Could it be the heat?

Some of those failures which are attributed to the drives are actually due to the interface or the wall wart. I've had the interface fail in 2 of those cheap $29 cases and would have tossed a perfectly good drive if I hadn't removed the drive to test it.

I'll disagree with a previous poster's suggestion about a NAS device. They're relatively expensive (you can build a fileserver with similar capabilities cheaper), and they're SLOW.

For music files speed doesn't matter. Even 10Mbps is fast enough to rip and play discs and with RAID the backup is done in the background. Besides, how can a gigabit transfer rate be slower than USB? Please explain.

If a Buffalo TB NAS can be had for $600 how can you build it cheaper? How do you get a TB of drives, RAID controller, interface with USB ports, and a case with power supply for less than $600?

Better still, build your own fileserver with 2 drives running in RAID 1 (full redundancy) for well under $500. Then get an external hard drive to back up the fileserver

More details please. It sounds interesting but I can't figure out how to pull it off.

What volume of storage will you get for your $500? To equal a TB in RAID 5 (about 700 gig) with only 2 disks in RAID 1 would take the Seagate 750 gig drives which are over $300 each. So thats $600+ and you have to add the rest.

What enclosure do you use for the drives?
Is the RAID hardware or software based?
Would this work with multiple drives? I have over a TB of files so need multiple drives.

Thanks

I have no way to prove this but I believe the consensus is that if your PC has so much running that the disk reads can't keep up with something as slow as digital audio then the sound is being compromised anyway by all of the background activity.

Michael, you seem to know a bit about this, and I also considered the route you advocate with a cheap computer controlling the drives, but why not go with a board that supports SATA drives and has a RAID 5 controller built in? They also have IDE ports so you can have backup drives in the same box. I know a bit more $$ up front but SATA drives are cheaper and this is much more powerful so it seems like a better route in the long term.

I know just enough about that to be dangerous so any input would be appreciated.

Speed is not an issue. Even the slowest hard drive in the world is way fast enough for music playback.