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[Blue Boy]

Hi

I hope someone could guide me to the right decisison concerning HHD. I have spent hundreds of hours ripping my CD collection and I did go for the WAV. format just because it as near the CD quality as possible. Having a couple of hundreds CD's to go I'm now running out of space and need to buy a bigger HDD. I need at least 3 TB and as money is no concern regarding 3 or 4 TB I go for what I can find at my dealer. I have today three 2 TB HDD's one that I call working HD hooked up to my laptop for ripping, another hooked to my hifi and the third one is for safety backup. The brand is WD 3,5 and needs powersupply by an external adaptor.
My question is, are there any difference between 2,5 inch powered via USB and the bigger ones powered by a external adapter soundwise? I know that there is a difference in rotation speed and right now I'm up to over 50 000 tracks
so another queston is do the lower rotation time slow down search time when creating play list from different albums?
As I'm up for three new it will cost me some money so I don't want to go wrong. What do you people out there use?

Any input on this matter will be great!

[Axilian]

First of all - to save space i'd convert the files from Wav to flac. (you should notice no difference sound quality as flac is a loseless compression of wav files)

With regards USB powered drives  - the main issue is what version of USB you're using. I used USB3.0  2.5" external drives for a long while as they work great (USB3.0 can more than handle the throughput required for playback and USB 3.0 interface can supply thepower required for the  2.5" drive

Only problem I had was that I ran 4 external drives through one usb3 interface card so very occasionally on heavy use (i.e. copying a lot of data to one drive while playing from another it's would overload the interface card and buffer). This was the reason while I moved in the end to a NAS system fed into my PC (another possible option for you if you need a lot of HHD space)

If you are going the internal drive route just check that your motherboards HDD controller can handle drives high than 2TB as taht used to be a limit (I have a original i7 motherboard (x58 chipset) and taht's can't handle HDD > 2TB though plugging in a 3tb USB external is fine (they have their own controller)

[ErikN]

From a sound/noise perspective, I've found 2.5" drives substantially quieter than 3.5".  I don't have the luxury of putting my storage array in a room different than the one where we watch/listen. I run an array of 12 2.5" drives for the primary library and cannot hear them unless the room is dead silent and they are busy.

To help I never let them power down. The two loudest sounds (for mine at least) are spin up and head loading so I don't allow spin-down or unloading. I was concerned about longevity but my oldest drives have been like this for almost 50000 hours.

I would make a couple of suggestions.

  (1) Select your online and backup differently.  I picked enterprise-level 7200rpm 2.5 drives for the online library. Someday I will likely migrate to SSD. If money truly isn't an object SSD is both fast and silent.

  (2) For backups I don't care about noise, size, or for the most part speed. I keep 3 separate backups and really only care about cheap capacity. Right now my preference is 6TB 3.5 drives.

[astromo]

From a sound/noise perspective, I've found 2.5" drives substantially quieter than 3.5".  I don't have the luxury of putting my storage array in a room different than the one where we watch/listen. I run an array of 12 2.5" drives for the primary library and cannot hear them unless the room is dead silent and they are busy.

To help I never let them power down. The two loudest sounds (for mine at least) are spin up and head loading so I don't allow spin-down or unloading. I was concerned about longevity but my oldest drives have been like this for almost 50000 hours.

I would make a couple of suggestions.

  (1) Select your online and backup differently.  I picked enterprise-level 7200rpm 2.5 drives for the online library. Someday I will likely migrate to SSD. If money truly isn't an object SSD is both fast and silent.

  (2) For backups I don't care about noise, size, or for the most part speed. I keep 3 separate backups and really only care about cheap capacity. Right now my preference is 6TB 3.5 drives.

I'm with you on the 2.5" comment. Especially for PC cases where space is not expansive.

I've got two 5TB, Seagate Barracuda ST5000LM000-2AN170 units installed in my HTPC and they've been doing fine.

[Blue Boy]

Thank to all of you for your inputs. First of all my computers do support USB 3 so that is no issue for me. The HDDs I run today is also USB 3 HDDs but the ones with external power supply.
The reason I want to go with the USB powered ones is that it more easy on handling for me. I use to ripp, catalouging and work with the CD's in my office where I use my laptop. I use a HDD called working HDD used for just that reason and it also gives me a backup, then I copy everything to a second HDD for safety backup only and then I got a third HDD hooked up to my hifi system that is used for playing music, It might looks a little over the top with three different HDDs but better safe than sorry. 
It is a lot of copying between those three drives and connecting to powersupply and so on.
So now with help from your inputs I'm going to get three 2,5 Western Digital HDDs and get rid of all external powersupplies. The question now is wich one to choose. For me a HDD is just a HDD but looking to what WD can offer there is a lot of different HDDs, but all seems to have the same specs.

[blgentry]

If you are going to plug in several bus powered drives to the same host computer, you might consider an external powered USB hub that can provide a lot of current to each drive.  You may not need this.  Or you might.  I wanted to be sure, so I bought some Anker powered USB hubs that can provide something like 1.5A per port.  Which is more than enough to drive the bus powered drives.

Some computers don't like to send a lot of current from several USB ports at the same time.

I too have had good luck with WD external drives.  I own 4 WD "passport" bus powered drives that all seem to work well.

Brian.

[ErikN]

For the drive itself (not the enclosure), I think WD really only has two kinds for 2.5" consumer grade spindle. Blue is 5400rpm @ 2yr warranty and Black is 7200rpm, bigger cache, 5yr warranty.

[Blue Boy]

Right now I'm running 2 TB HDDs but they are filled so I can't add more albums. There is nothing else but CD's on these drives, except for some small videos that comes with some albums, but that's just few. I ripped add about 2 600 discs
from 1922 albums and boxsets. Still there is some more albums to add but I figure that a 4 TB would be enough for some years. So I just gonna use one HDD hooked up to my USB port. But I remember when connecting my USB DAC that there was some interference but can't remember if it was my old computer or the one I use now. Time will tell if nececery I go for a USB power supply. Does any of you know how to stream bitperfect via Wifi?
While searching for prices and delaers I run in to MyBook Cloud. It would make lifa a lot easier if I could ripp a CD  and then send it to MyCloud and then it safely copied it via RAID  by itself. To buy two 4 TB external HDD costs the same as a MyCloud with two 4 TB drives.

[ErikN]

I am unfamiliar with MyCloud but guess it is one of the various NAS appliances. Just in case, I feel compelled to mention that RAID is not a substitute for backup(s).  I'm insane and run RAID6 with 2 hot spares but I still keep backups. The biggest reason is accidental file deletion. Another is external damage to the system (dropping it, kid spills a cup of OJ into it, power surges, kid discovers pulling drives makes for pretty lights and sounds, theft, ...).

[swiv3d]

I have 2 maxtor 4tb drives attached to my macine for backup purposes and they have worked well and are not that expensive. My experience with a WD MyCloud device has led me to never purchase WD drives ever again!