External hard drive for expanding iTunes library?


My hard drive is nearly full and I need to get an external HD for my rapidly expanding music library. I use iTunes and stream the music to my Airport Express to my Marantz SR-7200's DAC . Using a bel-canto eVo 6 and Gallo Ref 3's makes good music to me. All my music files are Aiff(uncompressed) and currently use 106GB. I've read good reviews online about the G-DRIVE 500GB External Hard Drive but I'm curious if any other Audiogoners have used it or could recommend other large,quiet and reliable external hard drives. My computer is an iMac G-5.
Thanks for any help.
Howell
hals_den

Showing 2 responses by rbstehno

speed can be an issue. if your music server is also a repository for your other computers in the house and you have multiple streaming going on, i think it could make a difference. the disk is the slowest part of the system (if you are directly connected to your amp and are not using the network to stream the data) and if you can tweak better performance for reads and you use around 3/4 of your total disk space (compared to raid 1,10), why not use raid 5.
for music servers, i would recommend a raid 5 setup because it is faster reading the disk. you do pay a penalty on writes, but so what if the ripping of a cd takes another few seconds or minutes. when the music is played back, i want the fast access.