Someone please 'splain me


I want to set up a hard drive system so that my wife can enjoy uninterupted music as she is working downstairs. I'm somewhat familiar with the steps involved, but have several specific questions. Here is our setup:

One room upstairs:
Cable internet connection with PC connected to wireless router

Other room upstairs:
Audio system - CDP has digital input with USB-digital converter

Downstairs:
Networked PC

Questions:
1) Which 250GB external hard drive should I buy? I'm hearing conflicting opinions about what works/doesn't work with PC
2) Should I simply hook up the external hard drive in the audio room to a laptop, or....
Should we put a wireless Squeezebox on the router in the computer room upstairs, and is it even worth the expense to do so?
3) What cabling will I need?
4) Can my wife control the music from her computer downstairs?
5) Is iTunes the best music organizer for our needs?

And finally, do you think we need to install $1100 PC's on all of the CPU's? Only kidding, cable flamers...

Thank you,
Howard
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Showing 1 response by prpixel

Ckorody,

Excellent post.

I just wanted to stress that you should backup your music library regularly. I had almost 1300 CD's ripped in lossless go up in smoke last month when my music HD turned into a flaming ball of crap. I had a backup drive, but I had just loaned it to a friend to backup his data while doing a clean install. If you have a large collection of music, I suggest you go with either a Firewire800 or E-SATA drive for backup. USB2.0 drives are painfully slow so figure about 60-90 minutes for every 100GB of data.

On a side note, I have the Bolder modded SB2 with the deluxe power supply. It is so good that I sold my reference tube SACD/CD player here on Agon. I'll never go back to listening to the physical CD's again. I use a wince PDA to control the SB via wifi. I can browse through my entire collection with ease.