Which hard drive for digital music server?

Er, Dell PowerVault 745N. 1TB of hardware RAID5, four hot-swappable drives that net out to about 700MB of real storage. Loud as a 747 on the runway, tho', so I'd also recommend an acoustilock vCab.

Apple xServe RAID is a cool looking option too.

Seriously, I had *bad* problems with disk crashes using consumer drives. I really don't think they are supposed to be on 24x7...

RAID 5 is actually a bit more efficient--you only "lose" one of the four drives. Think of it like this--Drive A gets data X, drive B gets data Y, drive C gets data Z, and drive D gets X+Y+Z. If drive A goes bad, you recover the data by performing drive D-drive B-drive C. Similar for the other drives. Actually kind of cool. Given the time its taken to rip all my CDs, I use RAID 5 and highly recommend it.

Its all a balance of risk versus harm. In an ideal world, I could just ftp the drive contents to a remote data vault on the 'net. My investigations indicated that solution was a pretty freekin' expensive way of doing it...

I know RAID 5 doesn't protect against catastrophic failure in the sense of a house fire, lightning strike, etc. (I do have offsite photos of my gear/software for insurance). But, I'm not sure that was my issue.

The problem that I was running into was the lack of reliability of large consumer drives. My original idea was just to get four 250 GB drives and use a pair for backups. I'd rip enough to fill up one drive, copy the drive, and move to the next one. Figured I could add more pairs as time went by and locate one set offsite. Well, I had one drive crash before I had even filled it up. That caused me to double check the other three, and I found bad sectors on all of the others. This, on top of a prior crash of a 250 GB drive, and I started wanting something a little more engineered. The RAID server I bought is a NAS built for 24/7 commercial operation--a Dell Powervault 745N. Hasn't hiccupped in the time I've operated it (its been on fulltime).

Hopefully something cheaper will be available by the time I'm maxed out... ;)

I'm also not sure, but I may be able to get a fiber channel upgrade and a relatively "dumb" expansion case to string more drives together.

Then again, spending $3.5K on a high reliability NAS doesn't seem that offensive when you consider other high end audio gear. FBOW, it is less than I've spent on many other major components for my stereo. Even with a conservative $10 per CD, its also a lot cheaper than the 1200 or so CDs that are ripped to it. Its all about how much you value the time that it took you to rip all the CDs... I never wanna do that again.

I would observe, however, that I'm not the looniest in the asylum here. I seem to recall one member having purchased a maxed out xServe RAID, configured with seven 400 GB drives per side--6 for RAID 5 with one hot standby (about 4 TB of total storage, taking into account both sides).

Er, I've had four drives go bad on me. I definitely think RAID 5 is worth it, esp. now that you can get RAID 5 NAS boxes for under a grand. And, while my CDs are a "backup", the pain of ripping 2000 CDs is something I will gladly spend a grand not to do again... Mine tend to stay on 24/7, because they serve up tunes, and not being able to get to them fast defeats the point in my mind. Others may have a different internal calculus.