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[marko]

things are getting tight...

the audio drive's all but full, to the point where I've left ripped files on the incoming drive after checking tags etc...

I'll be looking for an absolute minimum 250 gig, but bigger is always better when shopping for disk space, no?

anyone got any recommendations to get me rolling in the right direction?

I want the best balance I can get between size, price and quality. I'm thinking Western digital...
but I'm not sure...  I've found it (not in stock) priced @ £269, which is just a tad over £2 a gig. Seems there could be a fair size chunk of future-proofing to considered (500gb + 300mb/s) in the price?

Is there any reason I'm not aware of yet that i might want to consider an external, usb drive instead?

cheers for any feedback,
-marko.

[jgreen]

If you are as price-conscious as me, bare drives will always be the best solution.  BTW, the prices you are quoting, even allowing for conversions, etc, seem way high.  Go to pricegrabber.com and you should see plenty of drives around $.40/per gig.  The 250's seem like the sweet spot, currently.

I've used WD and Seagate for years, and had great results.  I've lost 1 WD, but found the warrantee exchange on their website very good--I had a replacement within days.

Avoid Hitachi, as a general rule.  Their links back to the IBM "Deathstar" drives (I lost one of those),  make them a poor choice for data you might actually want.

Currently, IDE or ATA are cheaper/slower.  That's all I use for music.  SATA and SATA II are faster but require new cards to hook to older computers.

Firewire and USB are very handy but are more expensive and slower.  I figure you pay $100 for the enclosure.  You can always make your own, but that's still adding $50 to the project, at least.

If you don't mind the clutter, keep buying moderately-sized drives.  They're cheaper per gig, and within the next 12 months drives are expected to go to 1 tb.  Prices will keep falling.

Congrats on having too much music.

[BartMan01]

Couple of thoughts:

I've always used WD drives, but when I finally buy a new SATA II drive (now that my main system can take those) it will be a Seagate.  Seagate drives are generally quieter (from what I have 'heard' on avsforum and others).

Second - consider getting a NAS device.  They are getting 'reasonably' priced

A well received on is the Buffalo Terrastation ($999)
http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail.php?productid=97&categoryid=19

It can be 4*250 drives, or 1 * 1TB drive, or 1 * 500 (RAID 1), or 1 * 750 (RAID 5).  It has USB and GB Ethernet.

[jgreen]

Seagate makes a great product, and their prices are now competitive with WD.  At similar price points, I choose the Seagate also. 

Bart's suggestion about NAS (Network Attached Storage) is worth considering for the low-end or ultra cheap guy like myself.  It's my impression that there are some good choices around the $1,000 mark, in addition to the great choices for tens of thousands of dollars. 

But there are also some interesting options for around $300-$400.  WD and Maxtor, I think, have firewire/USB drives that also have t100 ethernet ports.  This means they can sit on a network cable like a network printer or a PC does, and all network members could have full access to it.  T100 is not a fast protocol, t1000 (gigabit) ethernet is roughly the speed of firewire, so t100 is one tenth of that.  But for backup, it's an elegant solution.

For the grand that he's talking about, you're getting fast access and it APPEARS, you have the ability to swap out drives.  This is important, because when you have 4 drives in a RAID you have 4X the breakdown likelihood.  If you can't remove the drives, which is the case in the fully enclosed systems (LaCie), the entire product is shot.

For pure pathetic comedy, you can build your own NAS.  Any old computer will do, or even just a cheap board and chip. You just start hooking up hard drives via $40 raid cards.  This system looks terrible, works OK, and the TCO is around $200 plus the cost of drives.

[mesue]

I just bought my first Seagate drive for the 5 year warranty.

I'll throw one other idea into the mix… Ximeta Netdisk. This is like a NAS device but a little different. It doesn't have to be specially formatted, but requires a driver on all your PCs that are going to access it. I use it to store all my music files so they're accessible from anyone on the network. As long as I assign it the same drive letter on all PCs that access it, I can swap music libraries and not have to worry about paths changing. You can buy the enclosure by itself, but I found mine cheap as a refurbished unit, and when I outgrew the 160 GB drive, I popped in a 300 after finding a good deal on one.

[marko]

$1000, even taking the exchange rate into account, is so far over my head it's out of sight.
For a start, the wife would never wear it, no matter how I try to dress it up (imagine how many cushions & curtains you could buy with a grand!!)

Interesting tip re. Seagate's 5 year warranty. Is there anything dodgy in the small print?

Need to dig out my motherboard manual to see if I can use eide and SATA, or if I'm limited to one or the other.
I've decided against external. Internal will do just fine me.

Interesting stuff coming out here, I didn't realise the options were so many and so varied. I knew about RAID servers, but I don't think I'm quite ready to step into that league just yet

I'll check the manual, then read some more reviews, and post back.
keep the thoughts coming, it's interesting reading.
cheers,
-marko.