Mini-Mac Server as an NAS

4TB: Wow, you got quite a music collection! Let us know how long it takes to rip that much music.

Richard,
You can rip DVD-A discs and get the hi-rez PCM. Also, when Herman mentioned concatinated he's probably using software that acts as a "volume manager". Multiple drives can be used to present one sum-of-the-parts big drive to the user. And usually you can add drives to make the volume bigger over time.

If you plan to make a big volume of some sort and it will be over 2.2TB, make sure your O/S can handle it. I would think current Apple O/S can do it and Windows 7 can do it (and linux). And also be careful that there are new disks that are being sold now that use 4K physical sector sizes and use software in the drive to do 512 byte sector emulation for the O/S. Stay away from them. And I believe there are some type of "hybrid" drives out that have 4K sectors and somewhat large solid state caches to help overcome the performance degradation of 512 byte emulation when using physical 4K sectors. Stay away from them also.

larry

I just read the last few posts after the one I commented on. No surprise about the USB based drives showing little or no impact on performance. My original comments reflected my own experience with the drives which is not comsumer PC home use. Although, as a purist, I still wouldn't use them at home because there is still extra overhead using the drives. And since I don't have to pay for disk drives, I can use the best available... :)

larry

Al, notice there were no performance numbers in the marketing mumbo jumbo. For audio file storage, there is really no problem because it's basically sequential write once, then sequential reads. Anything that leans more towards random reads, and especially random writes, stick with "regular" drives if performance is somewhat critical or more so. That being said, these drives won't be used in "enterprise" class systems or arrays - at least the products I work on won't be using them - where performance counts.

larry