Need help moving from CDP to Mac Mini music server

I have not had good luck with consumer drives (Maxstor, LaCie) in a environment where they are on 24/7. I'd suggest looking at something like the 1TB Buffalo Terastation or a similar thing called the Big Yellow Box or something like that. You get NAS and RAID in the same small footprint and its quiet...

Whups, not Big Yellow Box, the other terastation-like thing I found was the "Yellow Machine."

Here's links to both:

http://www.yellowmachine.com/products/index.htm
http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail.php?productid=97

Both seem to run about $1K for 1TB, which gives you about .7 TB of actual storage if configured for RAID5.

In this vein, just saw a dealhack note--the 1TB terastations are available from http://www.buy.com for $670, shipping included.

Matt,

I can't vouch for the Yellow Machine, but I do own a terastation. It is very quiet. Besides, one benefit of a NAS is that it can be put anywhere you can run ethernet (i.e., a closet somewhere). It also means it can be accessed by any computer on the ethernet network. Mine is shared by a computer in my study, a computer attached to my main rig, a slim device in my bedroom, a slim device in my pool room, and an audiotron in my garage.

Ethernet v. firewire isn't an issue. Even slow ethernet is 10 mbps, which is a lot faster than your AE or your firewire.

And, as far as backups, RAID 5 isn't a perfect solution, but it is a pretty good compromise in my mind. The theory of RAID 5--this is kinda simplified--is that it is made up of four drives, say A, B, C and D. If you are writing data, it writes Block 1 on A, Block 2 on B, Block 3 on C, and Block 1 + Block 2 + Block 3 on D. If Drive A goes bad, all that data can be recovered by subtracting Block 2 and Block 3 from Drive D. In other words, for any single drive failure, it is completely redundant. You are screwed with a two drive failure. But, if you are just backing up drive A to drive B, you are screwed with a two drive failure anyway.

I did use my terastation with both Win XP computers and a Mac Mini, so there shouldn't be any interface issues.

As far as the cute drives made to look like the Mac Mini, I wonder about heatpipe efficiency and longevity. Like I said, I've had major problems with drives blowing up and losing data. I haven't researched heat pipe systems extensively, but wonder about whether the implementation is as efficient in cooling as fan based systems. The more heat, the shorter the drive life.

My terastation has been on 24/7 for 9 months and never hiccupped. The Lacie drives and Maxstor drives I tried never lasted more than about 3 months...

Matt, be careful, RAID striping gets you transfer speed, not redundancy. Let me try RAID 5 again. Say you want to store 3 numbers -- 012, 147, and 532. With the four disks, RAID 5 puts 012 on Disk A in Block/Sector X. In that same Block/Sector on Disk B, it puts 147. In that same Block/Sector on Disk C, it puts 532. In that same Block/Sector on Disk D, it puts 691, which is the sum of what is on A, B and C in that location. So...

If Disk A goes bad, it can recover the data for Block/Sector X on that disk by taking 691 and subtracting what is on that Block/Sector on Disks B and C: 691-(147+532)= 012.

If Disk B goes bad, it can recover the data for Block/Sector X on that disk by taking 691 and subtracting what is on that Block/Sector on Disks A and C: 691-(012+532)= 147.

If Disk C goes bad, it can recover the data for Block/Sector X on that disk by taking 691 and subtracting what is on that Block/Sector on Disks A and B: 691-(012+147)= 532.

Disk D, obviously, can be recreated from A, B and C. This is a simplistic version, but RAID 5 is higher efficiency than mirroring because the effective storage you get is (N-1)*S, where N=number of identical disks and S=size of disks. For mirroring, obviously, the efficiency is N*S/2.

Maybe the tera isn't pretty, but mine's in my closet, do I don't worry about it. ;)

Good luck--as far as Mac Mini specs go, I bought a 1.4GHz one with the bigger memory package and it was overkill for doing audio.

"But with a USB controller generating its own word-clock signal, the frequency remains steady." Well, only as steady as the clock in the USB interface. It is not a panacea, because some USB chips are pretty bad jitter-wise.