Storing music on an external hard drive

[superfan]

Hello:
I have a few questions regarding external hard drive? (EX. Seagate 320 GB)

1. Does anybody store music in an external hard drive?

2. If so, how much music MP3’s can be stored in it? (ex. MP3’s that are 128 K bits a second)

3. Is it easy to work with? Meaning that you would be able to insert files and folders at any location?

4. How long are they compatable for? Is this something that would have to be replace in one-two years with a new model?

Thanks in advance.

[easye]

1. Of course.
2. 1min takes roughly 1MB. So, 4.5MB per-song is probably a good number to use as 4.5 minutes is a decent average estimate. A 320GB formatted might leave you about 300GB usable space. If my math is correct, that would leave you enough room for about 66,666 songs.
3. External Drive = Internal Drive for the purposes of user interaction.
4. As long as whatever computer can see the drive/read the file system/have media player, it should work fine. New model hard drives??? You will always see larger & cheaper in the future. New audio format??? There are some others that some folks like for whatever reason (lossless, more compact, whatever), but for most people: mp3 remains the most used mainstream audio format.

[superfan]

easye:

Thank you so much for your help and expertise.

Best Wishes

[jedijake]

Let's put it this way. If you have a 300 GB external hard drive, you'd probably be able to store more music that you'd ever be able to download or somehow acquire. You'd easily be able to store every song every to make AT40 several times over and store it as long as you have a computer with a USB port.

Granted nothing strange happens to the external drive.

[tacomalo]

...jedijake just said it all...I've just learned the hard way what happens when an external hard drive crashes with most of your AT40 collection on it! 500GB of music, which was about 1000 AT40 shows converted to 320kbps mp3 is now unrecoverable! It took at least 100 hours to copy these shows onto the hard drive--and some of the shows were received via downloads so there is no backup.

In any case, I'm still a firm believer in hard drives as your music is far more accessible than on a CD or DVD--and the solution is simple.

From now on, I am only buying hard drives that "mirror". Mirror external drives include two drives in one case. Whenever you copy something, it is copied onto both drives--so if one drive crashes--you've still got the backup.

By the way, I've been buying external drives for about 5 years now--and I can tell you that they get cheaper every 2-3 months. I can now buy a 1 terabyte drive with an additional 1 terabyte mirror drive for a little over $200. Five years ago, you couldn't get a drive one tenth that size for that price. (by the way, shop online or watch the sale ads, the prices vary greatly from store to store)

[superfan]

Thank you Tacomalo

That "mirror" hard drive is an excellent idea. All of my AT40 shows are either on CD's or DVD's.

I would purchase one to store my AT40 collection and a seperate collection to store singles that appear on the Billboard Hot 100.