[julian67]

You're right, there's no substitute for having multiple backups but HDD's do not fail on a uniform schedule even if they are the exact same model running on the same hardware at the same temperature. The chances are ridiculously slim that both drives will die at the same time such that you don't have time to replace the bad hard drive before the 2nd one fails. And of course there's also the added benefit that redundancy is done automatically so there's no need to setup a backup routine, the data is mirrored automatically when it is written.


That said, you're right, there is no substitute for having multiple backups.

Backblaze (an online backup company that broadly speaking uses the same consumer grade disks as you and I) occasionally publishes interesting data on disk longevity, failure rates and so on. See http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/11/12/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/ It is not comfortable reading unless you are organised enough to purchase and discard disks every X number of years (where X is probably 4), and you also have a decent back up regime. On my home desktops and laptops and storage devices I've experienced a number of disk (and more rarely motherboard) failures over the last 15 years aprox. (since owning my first PC) and quickly learned the value of duplication and back up. Most of my data losses can thus be attributed to my own dumb mistakes, or very angry girlfriends smashing the ****** out of my stuff for reasons unrelated to technology or to civilised discourse.

As someone who has, in the past, tried to save money in the wrong places I can attest that disk failures (or mere partition table or file system corruption if you are lucky) also occur because cheaper consumer disk enclosures are as dreadful as their low price suggests. There really is no substitute for backing up your data to good quality disks managed by good quality controllers. Cloud back up is great until the day of reckoning comes and you discover that cloud backup vendors find it easier to refund your subscription and yadayadayada with the bs than to restore your data. Cloud hosting and back up is a bit like the banking system's reserve deposits - very important and real to you and me, but utterly inconsequential and notional to the people who are making profits and don't quite believe the day will ever arrive when payment is required.

 

[devhen]

Backblaze (an online backup company that broadly speaking uses the same consumer grade disks as you and I) occasionally publishes interesting data on disk longevity, failure rates and so on. See http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/11/12/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/ It is not comfortable reading unless you are organised enough to purchase and discard disks every X number of years (where X is probably 4), and you also have a decent back up regime. On my home desktops and laptops and storage devices I've experienced a number of disk (and more rarely motherboard) failures over the last 15 years aprox. (since owning my first PC) and quickly learned the value of duplication and back up. Most of my data losses can thus be attributed to my own dumb mistakes, or very angry girlfriends smashing the ****** out of my stuff for reasons unrelated to technology or to civilised discourse.

As someone who has, in the past, tried to save money in the wrong places I can attest that disk failures (or mere partition table or file system corruption if you are lucky) also occur because cheaper consumer disk enclosures are as dreadful as their low price suggests. There really is no substitute for backing up your data to good quality disks managed by good quality controllers. Cloud back up is great until the day of reckoning comes and you discover that cloud backup vendors find it easier to refund your subscription and yadayadayada with the bs than to restore your data. Cloud hosting and back up is a bit like the banking system's reserve deposits - very important and real to you and me, but utterly inconsequential and notional to the people who are making profits and don't quite believe the day will ever arrive when payment is required.

 
Thanks for that link, that's some interesting data. All this talk has got me thinking that I may need to add a 2nd or 3rd external drive and store those ones off-site. As they say, "only the paranoid survive".
 
I haven't bought a ton of hard drives but probably about 10 over the last 15+ years and I've actually only ever had 1 fail and fortunately I was still able to retrieve the data although it took a while and the hours between it starting to fail and me getting the data off of it were excruciatingly stressful. It was a 2TB Western Digital Green. All of my other drives have survived. I've got a couple in my closet that are over 10 years old and were used for more than 6 years and still work like a charm but they don't have very useful capacities.
 
The fact of the matter is... it only takes 1 drive failure, combined with an ineffective backup plan, to make you want to claw your own eyes out. Its ALWAYS better to be safe than sorry.
 
Never keep your data in only one place people!

 

[J.Pocalypse]

I use to have about 115GB of FLAC, but have since moved all my music listening to streaming. I do keep movies/tv shows on an external HDD which is about 200GB.

 

[Makiah S]

  I use to have about 115GB of FLAC, but have since moved all my music listening to streaming. I do keep movies/tv shows on an external HDD which is about 200GB.

ugh if we include HDD Video... yea there's an easy 2gbs of that.... for my at least 

 

[Magick Man]

I'm not a big fan of SSD, frankly.  I know the advantages they're supposed to have over conventional disks but I had the singular bad luck of experiencing 2 SSD failures on a Macbook that I upgraded to use with SSD (2 years back, purchased a new one since).  To be honest, I think it must have been some hardware incompatibility although Apple never offered an explanation for it.  It was extremely fast...while it lasted.  But if/when they fail, they fail without warning and catastrophically.  I learned the hard way to always have a bootable conventional harddisk with me at the time.  Became a royal pain very quickly (nothing worse than a system that you know is not totally reliable).  Back to conventional disks and this drobo 'beyond raid' storage now.

I don't use anything but Intel SSDs, other brands simply have too many bugs and issues. Their firmware, compatibility, and NAND quality is unmatched in the industry.

 

[OddE]

.(...) the chances of 2 or more hard drives failing at the same time is almost zero.

-They do have a couple of failure scenarios which will take out both, though:
a) They share the same power supply.

b) Some bloke breaks and enters and runs away with it.

c) Your house burns down.

etc, etc.

 

[MonkeyShots]

My music is all stored on the original cd's that i bought. I keep a flac copy of about 2/3 of thoose on my computer to load my portable audio players with or listen to from the computer.
 
I only have a handfull of music beyond 44.1/16.

 

[zorin]

  When I first read the subject line for "storage"...I thought well maybe he means relating to physical storage of music.  So when the options came up I really needed a ZERO option because I DON'T do computer audio at all...hell, I rarely even listen to CDs...my music is solely analogue based (tape & LP).
 
No, I'm not being sarcastic...just letting you guys know...

There should have been an option in the survey to choose - No Bytes Storage Used / 0 Bytes Storage

 

[LFC_SL]

A U-shaped distribution. Interesting...

This will be predictable mathematics. If you took the average size of music collection, then option 1 and option 4 would correspond with all lossy or all lossless. The middle brackets accounting for the other sizes of music collections.

In practice something like say the iPod classic capacity is more than enough for an all lossy music collection, but only permits a portion of all lossless collection.

If Jude wants to influence a manufacturer then he need only feedback the dedicated enthusiast needs 1tb for their lossless collection.

This is also all borne out in forum posts.

 

[koolas]

60GB in HD tracks, and all the rest on CDs and vinyl records, and off course can't forget about almighty Spotify

 

[imrazor]

I don't use anything but Intel SSDs, other brands simply have too many bugs and issues. Their firmware, compatibility, and NAND quality is unmatched in the industry.

Same here. The one SSD I currently have is an Intel 335, but I don't use it for storage. I can't afford a big boy SSD, but I was going to be doing SSD caching with it, so I wanted it to be as reliable as possible. So I got a 60GB model to cache my old, reliable WD 640GB HD with.
 
I'm in the minor leagues as far as media storage. I have about 20-30 GB of 256kb mp3s (maybe 3000 altogether), 26GB of FLAC files (about 1000), and about 30GB worth of music videos. I do a lot of listening via Spotify and Pandora, and can't afford to buy and rip a massive CD/DVD/Blu-Ray collection.

 

[EarG]

I do store my multimedia files (music/video/photo) in my QNAP 470 pro + 4x4TB (RAID 0), and 2 x LACIE Porsche  4TB for backups. 

 

[Eddie Q]

Are you sure it's a RAID 0 (Stripe)?  If true, then you lose everything if one drive fails.  At least you can do RAID 1 (Mirror).  If you want the best of both, opt for RAID 10 (Stripe & Mirror).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

 

[PXSS]

Lossless music library is 200GB
Counting TV shows, movies, and video games. I have over 6TB of media.
Yikes

 

[spookygonk]

My music got too big for one external harddrive, so it's split over two: "A-M" & "M-Z"
 
I'm now slowly going through all my albums and finding out what I still like and deleting the ones I don't or removing multiple copies (how many variations of DSotM do I really need?)