tonyballinger.com

I have a pretty serious music collection happening. It comes out to about 300GB of mp3′s, most of which is from my about 2,500 CDs. The rest can largely be attributed to a really serious binge on emusic.com, when they used to have an all-you-can-eat policy. (That policy is no more, btw…)

So storage is a real issue. I had the same problem years ago with my CD collection. Where exactly do you put over 2,000 CDs? Answer: anyplace you can fit them. The solution for my CD collection ended up being a couple of monstrous CD racks from racksandstands.com. If you’re interested, they had quick shipping and good customer service.

But now that my music collection is largely digital, I’ve run into the same old problem of storage. The main issue with having a serious digital music collection is having a backup of it. With that in mind, my collection was on a pair of Maxtor 200GB drives, soft raided together with Apple’s Disk Utility in OS X. But once the collection grew past 200GB, it required a second pair of drives for the newer stuff. So, my machine has 5 internal drives in it: 4 for music, one for the OS, apps, etc.

Here’s the pickle: macs don’t typically have 5 storage bays for IDE drives. I’ve managed to put my boot drive where a Zip drive should be. (By the way, does anyone even use Zip disks anymore? Is Iomega still a company?) But this solution appears to pretty specific to my machine (a dual 800mhz G4). The newer "mirror doors" G4′s have a lot less wiggle room inside for an ATA card, a bunch of cables, and 4 drives. And don’t get me started on the G5′s. They can only fit two drives by default, and the options for increasing their internal expansion are a little pricey for what you get, in my opinion.

So I’ve purchased an external raid 5 firewire case. It’s a pretty nice piece of equipment with three hot swappable bays, and an alarm when a drive goes down. Now my music collection is safe and sound. Plus, I’ll be free to upgrade to a G5 when I want to since my music collection is no longer tied to my box.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 22nd, 2005 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Gadgets, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.