[commando]

CD -> WAV -> FLAC -> DVD-R (with a copy of FLAC burned onto it too). Fits about 10 CDs, give or take.

 

[jefemeister]

Quote:

Originally Posted by dsavitsk I have a 1/2 TB RAID 5 array

Sweet. This is exactly what I've been thinking about doing lately. Can you recommend a good site to find information on how to do this? What do you think approximate cost would be? Did you use super fast drives like the Seagate Cheetah? Also, as a side issue, do you use the standard windows network interface or something special?

edit: forgot, why level 5? I've had some people say level 3 is the way to go.

 

[breez]

Speaking of tape drives and uncompressed vs. compressed space, an already compressed audio file will not compress further.

 

[EasyRaider]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Distroyed With harddrives being as cheap as they are (and with awesome 5-year warranties), it's most economic to have a raid setup going on. The life of optical media is still in debate. The chances of 2 harddrives failing simulatenously, however, is quite low, so when one dies, just replace it with another and you're back in business. It would really suck to have verified that data on your dvd's at the time of burn, and come back to them a few years later, only to find they had unreadable errors in them from some unforeseen medium decay.

RAID really is meant for high server performance and low downtime rather than as backup. Multiple hard drives failing at the same time isn't as uncommon as one might think. I would feel safer with CD backups on quality media than with RAID only.

That's not to say you shouldn't use RAID, but you should always have backups of important data in a different physical location in addition to RAID.

 

[dsavitsk]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jefemeister Sweet. This is exactly what I've been thinking about doing lately. Can you recommend a good site to find information on how to do this? What do you think approximate cost would be? Did you use super fast drives like the Seagate Cheetah? Also, as a side issue, do you use the standard windows network interface or something special? edit: forgot, why level 5? I've had some people say level 3 is the way to go.

My understanding, which is limited on RAID 3, is that it is really only important if you cannot afford a break in your data read speeds -- that is, if you run a server farm or something, and you need to replace bad drives and rebild with minimal impact. It can also be useful for large files, but otherwise RAID 5 seems to be an easier choice, if for no other reason because the controllers are cheaper.

One important consideration is that not only do you need to be able to get additional identicle drives in the future if you have a drive failure, but -- as a friend learned the hard way -- you need to be able to get the same controller. That is, if the controller craps out before the drives, it can be trouble.

There was a good IDE RAID controller roundup on Tom's Hardware site a while back, and it is as good a place to start as any. IDE solutions are pretty cheap if you consider 3-4 250Gb IDE drives @ about $150 per plus a $150 controller, you can do a 1/2 TB for $600 and add a warm spare for another $150. SCSI will be faster, but I would expect the cost to be several thousand dollars -- the controller itself will likely cost more than the whole IDE solution. Even a SATA array I set up for an office cost several thousand to do, and is really only worth it for very intense I/O.

As for networking, while the network connections are likely the bottleneck, I have never had a problem with streaming files. Even 802.11b should be plenty fast to stream mp3 or flac files. For video you might want a bit more speed, but not necessarilly.

-d

 

[kunwar]

450GB of FLAC's on a 1.5 TB server exclusively for music and still counting.
all that music of course is copied onto Taiyo Yuden DVD+R's (THE FINEST BAR NONE) which are for archival purposes.


As for a question asked previously in this thread about hard drives being better off left running rather than turned off, I have heard no such thing and a HDD has a standard lifetime of about 10,000 hours after which its capacityto reliably and safely store data would be suspect.
In terms of usage for most users this works out to be about 3-5 years.
In my case a lot less cosidering they run upto 12 hours a day.
Also the ability of the HDD R/W head to track degrades over time resulting in longer access times. needless to say with today's upgrade cycles being 2-3 years in most cases, HDD usually don't fail.

 

[ted_b]

I have a 160 gig addtl internal hd that I put my FLAC files on, and also copy them at the same time to a 160 gig external Maxtor drive (for back-up.) Same for the cue files generated by EAC.

ted_b