Recent technology advancements suggest the largely increased use of hard drives in the activities that make up our daily lives. Even children's toys are expected to receive hard drives in the near future. As I look at my vast collection of CDs and burned CDs collecting dust, the idea of backing it all up on a hard drive becomes very appealing. But, what's the best way to store up to 60 Gbs of music allowing for more shelf space, easier transportation, and better maneuverability? Purchase an external hard drive now? An internal hard drive? Wait for new and improved technology?
Help me O-nerds!
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Get an Ipod
Best way to backup music is an ipod, and they come in 60 meg versions. If you don\'t need play your music, then a laptop HD and an external enclosure is a little cheaper.
re
60GBs is cheap to store... you can find 80-200G drives on deal for under $100 (with rebates, 120GB drives are often found for $30-$50).
If data integrity is critical, consider RAID to give some redundancy. Even a simple mirror should be sufficient. Keep in mind that most desktop usage HDDs have a life of 3-5 yrs.
Incidentally, Gb is gigabits, which is little more than 7MB. GB (gigabyte) might be the intended one.
Hard Drive
I agree with the first post: buy now. There's no sense in waiting since the technology exists at reasonable costs.
One thing to consider is compression. If you're truely archiving your CDs, mp3 is not the way to go as you lose quality with the encoding. There are several lossless formats out there. The only downsize is that they do consume more disk space. I'd do some research, decide if you care about compression, and get something now.
You've got a lot of options at low costs, but you need to define what you want:
Cheap or Cost doesn't matter?
Portable or Fixed?
Network accessable or not?
Lossy or Lossless storage?
...etc.
When you answer those things, it'll be much easier to make a recommendation.
Why save it?
If they're collecting dust, then you aren't using them. Why do you need to save something you're not using? Start throwing some shit away and you'll have less to worry about.
Prioritize
The world will pass you buy if you just wait for the next best thing. You’ve got to decide what your objective is. Do you want old dusty music just to have it; then external hard drives are great. You can get a gig a dollar if you look for it (Newegg.com). They save space but they aren’t very portable. Do you want the convenience ($$) of music where/ever when ever you want it? Ipods are great for portability and travel but they are a relatively more expensive way to store old music. Maybe you’re at work all the time, so get a laptop. They’re portable and multifunctional.
Then there's the discussion of purity and quality of copying the music. How important is that to you? How fined tuned are your superman hears? Life’s full of trade offs. Decide now. Now! I said now!
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Buy Now. by Anonymous :: NR0 :: Show
Dude, do whatever works for you now (whether it be based on cost/capacity/coolness/etc. - you choose your priorities). If you wait 'til tomorrow you'll never get it done - that next great technology'll come and go and then you'll still want to wait for the next thing. In the end it probably won't matter anyway, just as your CD's have been relegated to the back shelf, so too will your mp3's. It's progress and it'll always make past technologies redundant. One suggestion tho, don't hedge all your bets on one solution - let's say you rip all your CD's or backups to HDD and then sell/destroy them 'cause "hey, I've got a copy". This could be a problem because: 1. in the future you may have a new found appreciation for audio quality and 128kbps doesn't cut it any more, or 2. Oh shit, my drive just failed and I've lost 60GB/$Xxxx.xx of music/data, etc. Whatever your solution, nothing beats having a quality original source, plus a backup or digital copy for convenience.