Hard disk for Music Server


I am building a PC as a Music Server.  Looking for help to pick hard disks.
Planning get 10 GB.

I am trying to get the best drives.....
Should I have say three 4 TB drives rather than one 10 TB?
How much capacity can one fill before it impacts performance? 70 %
Disk speed 5400 or 7200 rpm?
Brand of disk - HGST Ultrastar, WD Red, or WD Gold?

Thank you.
dcaudio

Showing 3 responses by rbstehno

If you are worried about data recovery or losing a disk on a raid 5 system, then use raid 6 which has 2 parity drives so you can actually lose 2 drives and still keep working. For casual use around the home for sharing music and video files, an external raid 5 (Or 6 if you can find it) will be the cheapest and still provide the read speed that you need. Ripping will be slower but who cares, you put a dvd in and come back in 15 mins to eject the dvd.
watch out for home cloud drives, they are slow, painfully slow.
You can create your own NAS drive by hooking up a drive on the back of your router that you can share. Pretty easy and no cost. I use a dedicated server with most of my hard drives and SSD’s attaches to it to do all file sharing and backups from that server In the early mornings. It’s main task during the day and night is running Roon, and soon Plex.
If you get 3 hard drives of 4G capacity, are you going to create a RAID 0 array to get your 10+G of space?
I worked for a hard drive manufacturer for many years and for music, it really doesn’t matter what type of drive you get. For music, you won’t see any difference in speed between 5300 or 7200 rpm. Actually, I even recommend against ssd for music. If you are using Roon or another app that has an index to your music, keep the index in memory or place that on ssd, that will give you better performance. If you build a RAID array or buy a single large disk, make sure you get a bigger disk to use as a backup
I spent over 42 years in IT with over 30 years in the performance end of things including storage systems costing over million dollars (EMC storage), the last 10 years actually working for a solid state/hard disk manufacturer. You always need a backup no matter what raid array you use or even if you spent over a million $$ on a disk subsystem.
If I was going to build an array for music and even for video, I would go with a raid 5 or 6 which gives you better reads at the expense of slow writes. But I also don’t like using software raid, if I was going to build a raid system I would buy a 4 or more disk system that provides the difference raid configurations.
All of my systems at home, either Linux or OSX, use an ssd for the system disk but use your typical 5400 rpm drives for the other uses.