[DouglasQuaid]

I have about 130-150gb of flacs on an external hard drive. I haven't completed ripping all my cds, but this external drive gets ridiculously hot so I only turn it on when I need to transfer my rips to it. I was planning to leave it running while my computer's on and use it to listen to my music, but I'm worried that it'll blow out and I'll lose my collection. I suppose a better enclosure and a back up drive would work, but it's a costly solution.

Where do you guys keep your flacs? I'm sure there are quite a few of you with considerably more music than me.

 

[IronLion]

Whats the point of storing all that music if you can't even listen to it? If you really think the drive's gonna kill itself, get a new one and try to transfer your music over to it, maybe in small partitions to allow the drive to cool periodically.

 

[BillC]

The cheap external drives don't have the smarts to spin down on inactivity and will eat themselves rather soon if you leave them running all the time. For me the time to rip all my music, take my digital pictures, etc. outweighs the hardware costs and I've bought a NAS Raid Box.

 

[star882]

Quote:

Originally Posted by BillC The cheap external drives don't have the smarts to spin down on inactivity and will eat themselves rather soon if you leave them running all the time. For me the time to rip all my music, take my digital pictures, etc. outweighs the hardware costs and I've bought a NAS Raid Box.

I have a cheap external drive (160GB Hitachi in a Coolmax enclosure) that has been running 24/7 for a few months. It still works.
Of course, it could be because of its metal construction. I also have a plastic CompUSA drive that runs very hot. I never run that drive for long.
BTW, a good trick for a large and good external drive array is to take an old PC (P2 or P3 is enough) and put a lot of drives in it. Then install Linux and make a file server.

 

[DouglasQuaid]

Quote:

Originally Posted by star882 BTW, a good trick for a large and good external drive array is to take an old PC (P2 or P3 is enough) and put a lot of drives in it. Then install Linux and make a file server.

If I bought a replacement motherboard for my p3-700, I could hook it up with my old geforce, but I'd find that a rather large waste of electricity.

I suppose sticking a cooler drive in a better enclosure would be my best bet. Only other option to that that I can think of would be to get a pci sata controller and get a new drive and mount it somewhere in the case with zip-ties or mini jumper cables.

 

[Revliskciuq]

I built a Pentium III box for peanuts, and installed 4 200GB HDD's in it. It's used exclusively for lossless storage.

I access my music through LAN/Wifi/Squeezebox3