How to manage a big itunes library?


I have had a mac mini running itunes for about 2 1/2 years now. The inevitable has happened, my first drive has failed, at least it's icon has stopped showing on the desktop and I can't access the files.

I had a feeling this would eventually happen. I have the files backed up, but this does create a headache to fix it. The files were originally ripped on 250GB drives and the backups are on 500s. I have 5 250GB drives and one 500GB drive, all pretty much full. I have a pretty big collection, about 5000 or so CDs.

I need advise on a solid solution for this type of setup. There are some pretty big drives comming out but I just don't know what would be the best option.

Also this might seem stupid, but I am wondering if there would be any loss in quality in a copy of the original rip vs the original???
ejlif

Showing 2 responses by jwynacht

I've been talking with Ejlif about this and doing some research on drives and backup and all that. Seems like it comes down to this:

1. Setup needs to be quiet as possible (or) removed to another room, ventilated closet, etc.
2. Setup needs unlimited* growth potential.
3. Setup needs to be backed up easily. Said backup needs to be easily transportable to another site (i.e. work, friend's home, etc.)

Given that I was thinking of getting the Western Digital MyBook Mirror Edition. The drive is set up with two drives, one which mirrors the other RAID 1. Here's a link to the drive:

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=466

From there, I copy all my music in iTunes over to this drive and I'm good to go. iTunes reads from one disk while the second disk acts as a local backup. I can then take a new third disk (same size) and, once parity is achieved between the two disks, swap in the new disk, take the old disk and store it offsite. BAM! Local backup, offsite backup. Ahh...

But what about adding more disk space? Take advantage of iTunes...you can add new drives as your library grows and it will remember the previous drives you've used. It's an intuitive feature but it does work.

These drives are fanless, *green* and really solid. The downside here is that these drives are USB. Though I'm not certain how much of a downside that really is.

Thoughts?
And speaking of storage, good articles to read here:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/1716207

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/2126252