Apple Lossless vs iTunes Plus

Jamesw20 - you're right to be paranoid about your hard drive failing, it eventually will, but the best strategy for dealing with that is to have a backup of your hard drive, or two, but CD's or DVD's aren't necessarily the best option.

With drives costing $100 per terabyte right now everyone should have a second drive that mirrors the regular storage drive. If you're really concerned, have a third drive and rotate the backups, keeping one off site at all times. Sounds obsessive but if you back up to another drive once a week and rotate the two backups once a month your chances of losing more than a week's worth of downloads are very low and the $200 you spent on the drives will seem like nothing if you ever really need them. Taking that a step further, you probably ought to replace the drives every two or three years.

It's a fact of digital life that we'll have to keep duplicating all our data over and over as technology advances. We think of CD's and spinning magnetic disks as standards but they'll be obsolete soon enough, just like the analog tape and Syquest and Jaz disks we used to rely on. Fortunately the cost of storage is getting to the point that it's not much of a consideration.

Jax2 - I said "CD's AND spinning magnetic disks," not, "CD's AS spinning magnetic disks." Yes, I understand the difference between optical discs and magnetic disks (notice the difference in spelling between "discs" and "disks"), my point was that either storage medium will eventually fail physically or be supplanted by a newer technology.

Blindjim - I got this Lacie drive for $99 when they had a special. The regular price is $119 but this vendor and almost all the other sites are constantly offering daily or weekly specials.

The sites I've found best to deal with are:
http://newegg.com
http://www.buy.com/
but you should also check out
http://frys.com/
http://www.tigerdirect.com/

A good way to find deals is to check these sites when you're in the market for something:
http://www.techbargains.com/
http://dealmac.com/
http://dealnews.com/
Techbargains has pretty good search functionality. Many sites like newegg and buy.com have newsletters that list whatever they're selling cheaply

I wasn't aware of any reliability issues with 1 terabyte drives but either smaller capacity drives or a RAID array are certainly great solutions, as Jax2 recommends.

Grege, Shadorne - my experience has been the same. While I'm perfectly willing to accept that some people can distinguish differences between lossless files and high bit-rate mp3's, what I've found is that at 256 or 320 kbps I stop thinking about the fidelity and just enjoy the music.