Recommend best external hard drive

[Anonymous]

Hi
Please recommend your best external hard drive.
I will be storing my prized CD collection (couple hundred) on the drive.
I would like to then plug the drive into my laptop and create playlist (play orders) to play from my IPOD or IPHONe via a bose system.

But first I need to back up and store my CDs digitally so I can get rid of the clutter.
Please recommend your hard drive.

I do not trust the cloud.

Thanks,

[Freeman]

Are you planning on ripping them to MP3s and storing them in that format? If so, I doubt you actually need an external hard drive. Even at higher quality settings, you aren't likely to need that much room on the hard drive. In fact, you could probably store them all on a flash drive for around $30 or less, depending on how much space you needed. I think an external hard drive would be overkill for the amount of space you are talking about, unless there are other reasons you want one.

As for not trusting the cloud, I can understand not trusting it by itself, but it would be an excellent way to have an offsite backup solution. If your CD collection is really prized, it would make sense to have some form of backup that would protect you from fire or other disasters that could destroy any local copies. Given the multiple options for free storage of music online now, I don't see why you wouldn't take advantage of at least one of them.

[Anonymous]

I think Freeman is correct about the flash drive. IIRC, most music CDs yield about 50MB of data, so that suggests your collection of 200 CDs would generate only about 10GB (10k MB) of data. You can buy a 32GB flash drive on Amazon for $20.

Since you really don't have that much data, back it up in multiple places. Spring for two flash drives, copy the entire collection to each of them. Keep one in your computer with an automatic backup for new music. Stick the second one in your sock drawer. Swap them every couple months.

That's all you need to do, IMO.

Sam2

[Anonymous]

Freeman wrote:Are you planning on ripping them to MP3s and storing them in that format? If so, I doubt you actually need an external hard drive. Even at higher quality settings, you aren't likely to need that much room on the hard drive. In fact, you could probably store them all on a flash drive for around $30 or less, depending on how much space you needed. I think an external hard drive would be overkill for the amount of space you are talking about, unless there are other reasons you want one.

As for not trusting the cloud, I can understand not trusting it by itself, but it would be an excellent way to have an offsite backup solution. If your CD collection is really prized, it would make sense to have some form of backup that would protect you from fire or other disasters that could destroy any local copies. Given the multiple options for free storage of music online now, I don't see why you wouldn't take advantage of at least one of them.

Thanks. Would you recommend some free storage sites?
I plan on take both post advise. Two thumb drives and the cloud.

[Freeman]

Anonymous wrote:Thanks. Would you recommend some free storage sites?
I plan on take both post advise. Two thumb drives and the cloud.

I've only used Google Music, so I can't really tell you how it compares to iCloud or Amazon's service. However, I can say that it is about as simple as you can get. Just set up a Google account(If you don't have one already), download the music manager, and point it to the directory containing your music files. It will upload the music in the background, then monitor the folder for any new songs added. You can store 20,000 songs for free and listen to them through just about any web browser. In the event you lost the local copies, you could also download them again.

[Anonymous]

Cool thanks.
I'll try google. I'm over the "i"s.