Paul's Posts — 04 October 2012
By Paul McGowan
We’ve been discussing HD storage for our music collections and I have been recommending you build your library based on USB connected hardware to your computer. A 2tB hard drive can be purchased for $100 and it’s fast and reliable, capable of a couple of thousand albums of storage.
USB is getting even faster with the introduction of the USB 3.0 standard. This standard is comparable in speed with the hard drive you have inside your computer! Most computers do not support this new 3.0 standard just yet, so purchasing a 3.0 USB drive won’t really buy you anything other than the promise of considerably faster speed whenever you do upgrade your computer.
And there it is again – the obvious advantage of going with cheep and cheerful USB drives to store, backup and manage your music library. If you’re just starting, make sure you purchase all 3.0 USB drives – typically they are only a few dollars more expensive and, as I mentioned, of no value for most of us right now. But whenever you decide to purchase a new computer, chances are excellent it’ll have the 3.0 USB standard built in.
Great to build your library with the best storage around.
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Dmitrylo
Cheap USB-drives are not very reliable. They live 1-2 years maximum. With them there is always the risk of losing data. So I prefer RAID-arrays.
christos
Paul,
What about internal hard drives? The SATA interface is much faster than USB 2.0, and there is one less power supply to worry about. An internal RAID configuration would be even nicer. And I agree with the previous poster, USB drives are more failure prone. A NAS would be good for backups, just make sure they don’t run while you are listening.
Ian Blacker
Question: I run a Porsche Lacie 1T USB backup for my MacbookPro, how do I intentionally send my HDTracks, LInn and iTunes music downloads to the hard drive, and then use it to play back when I use Amarra for playback via iTunes control?
Ian T Blacker.
petewilson
(To Ian Blacker) Ian, if you’re using that 1TB drive as a backup, you won’t want to use it as the primary drive for your music as well, if for no other reason than – where does the music get backed up to.
I think Paul’s idea of having two external drives for holding the music, and keeping them in sync manually, is reasonable if you have absolutely no backup strategy, or if your music library uses a very large part of your computer’s disk.
Since you have a Mac, all you need to do to get a pretty good backup is turn on Time Machine and let it backup to your external drive. This works pretty well for most circumstances.
If your music eventually gets too big, then you’ll need to follow Paul’s advice. As to how you get the music to the hard disk, here’s what Apple suggests (assuming you’re using iTunes to play):
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
If you do this, there won’t be any music on the MacBook when you travel, unless you carry the external drive with you….
Hope this helps.
MichaelHiFi
Be careful Paul when suggesting bigger is better, especially in computer audio. A 3 TB drive will frustrate many when it’s time for them to access their music library. There’s a lot of music software that won’t see the drive. Why? Because the file system is GPT and NOT MBR. The MBR filesystem is the common type found in nearly all Windows machines and is limited to 2 TB of storage, so when hard drives grow beyond that 2TB threshold, the file system needs to change. Now what you’d have is a 3TB hard drive which you may have to reformat to a 2TB MBR partition and leave a terabyte left. One could have multiple MBR partitions but I think many don’t want to go to the trouble.