[dburna]

I have a two part question.  I have a large lossless music collection (about 3.5 TB) and am running out of space.  I want to find a large amount of reliable external drive storage that would take me into the foreseeable future (4-6TB).  Problem is, I need to stay frugal on this one, so uber-expensive NAS or drive farms aren't going to fit my budget.  I need to consolidate to 1 or 2 drives.  I looked into the WD Studio II (2x3TB) enclosure until I realized that, with RAID 0, if either of the drives goes south you lose the entire thing.  As nice as it would be to have a single 6TB volume at my disposal, I don't want a solution that's half as reliable as two standalone discs.  So my questions are as follows:

1) Any recommendations for cheap/reliable (FW-preferred) storage drives in the 3-4TB range?  I am looking through reviews on places like Amazon, and it seems like there's somebody that rants about all the drives out there (can't please everyone?).  Was hoping to find something cost-effective FW drives -- what would you recommend?  I have a Mac Mini 2009, so I can only use USB 2.0 or Firewire 800.

2) [This is the one I am really struggling to figure out].  If I migrate all my music to two 3-4TB drives, how can I consolidate the iTunes library?  I know you can consolidate to a single drive fairly easily with iTunes (automated process), but how would one manage to consolidate to two drives?  If you use the migration feature in iTunes to copy files over to a single drive, what happens if that drive is not big enough to hold the whole music library?  Will it simply stop migrating once it runs out of space?  If so, how can you ensure that you can migrate over the remaining files (and only those files) to the second drive?  Seems like there might be a way to do this, but it isn't clear how.

Thanks to anyone who can provide a recommendation for 1) or an answer to 2).


-dB (finding out that, contrary to the astro-physicists' claim, space is not infinite)

P.S. For FW drives, I need to daisy-chain them, one reason why I have eliminated solutions like Seagate's Backup series of drives (I think they have only one FW port).

[Crimson]

The simplest solution, being that you're daisy-chaining drives, is to keep your current drives and add additional drives as required. When adding a drive, just point iTunes to the new drive for rips. iTunes will retain all indexing for the existing drives and all new rips will go to the new drives.

[skunark]

I have a '10 mac mini server (no thunderbolt or USB 3.0) that I use as a central iTunes server and ripping station. One thing that you didn't seem to discuss is your backup solution... If you don't have one (physical CD, online backup, or Time Machine) please address that first.   Really no excuse not to have an at least online backups for $5/month(50/year) if you have 3.5TB of music.  I actually do all three with the following setup:

Backup Storage:
A brand new Synology DS713+ NAS populated with two 8TB drives running time machine server.  Also backups other computers in the house and will probably expand to 16TB of storage next year and might actually dump my mac mini.  The NAS has two expansion options (2 bay or 5 bay) and can also enable 1 or 2 disk failure protection if desired.

Music Storage:
Ripped CDs: gtech 2TB FW800 drive (single drive) which is what iTunes/Rippers points at.  I have a 3TB WD USB3.0 drive that I will be migrating this to (old time machine drive, and it will run at the slow USB2.0 speeds, not a big deal honestly)
HiRiz Music: gtech 1TB FW800 drive (running in raid 0, older drive)  I don't need this to run with iTunes which makes it a great logical boundary to split between multiple drives.  btw, this will be migrating to teh 2TB drive above and the 1TB drive will become my physical offline copy of the download music.

Movie Storage:
Now with the iTunes Match/Cloud service, I've taken all of the downloaded TV shows and movies offline as a backup.   Only a few of the TV shows and movies don't appear in the cloud, but it's nothing I'm concerned about today as I can always add them back.   One annoying thing is that iTunes still downloads anything I've purchased on the Apple TV...

Probably the only reason why I went with a NAS box is that Time Machine doesn't allow you any options on how to back up your drives, so you just need a very large massive volume.

In your case I would probably do a USB3.0 4-8TB drive for the music storage, raid 0 is fine as you better have an actual backup.   Assuming you had a reasonable network connection I would sign up for online backups (pick one that backups USB drives like backblaze) and then exclude your music from Time Machine backups.  Having the physical CDs and online backups, to me this would be the minimum bar for any music library larger than 1TB.    So assume the 6TB WD drive cost around $480 plus $50/year for an online backup service, that might be your minimum backup bar.     To step it up I would consider getting the 6TB drive, online backup and an 8TB drive for time machine backups that is large enough to back up your music.  If you have more backup storage needs in your house then a NAS box or Drobo are good options.

If my plans with the Synology NAS doesn't work out, I plan to just dump Time Machine altogether and just pay for the family online backup plan (around $150/year).  Since my backup needs are close to $480 6TB drive currently, that is about the same dollar for a good three years of online backup protection.   

To drag this out a little longer, I would love to see a lossless online music backup solution that is resembles iTunes Match.....   

[lokie]

I think skunark and Crimson have summed it pretty nicely.

The conclusion is to keep it simple or get complicated. I am in the same boat as you with regards to size of library and trying to figure out my next move.

I am also migrating my concert video's and favorite You Tube videos to a hard drive along with family content. I am constantly dumping videos and photos my kids generate from our iphones and Ipad.

Anyway, I have decided to keep it simple as Crimson suggests keep using single drives.  My last experience with NAS drives was not good. Although they have come a long way, I'm still not convinced that's the way to go.

Here's a previous thread on this very subject: http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=111480.msg1157178#msg1157178

 

[dburna]

RE: Kiss.  So I went to the big Apple Store in Grand Central, NYC this morning and looked for someone knowledgeable (I did find one, BTW).  I got the answer I expected, though not the one I really wanted.  Long story short: it is not possible to maintain detailed control over your iTunes library the way I would like (e.g. I can't migrate half my library to one drive and half to another without some loss of functionality).  In this case, the loss of functionality would be loss of my Playlists.

Keeping in mind the advice to keep it simple, I think this is the cleanest way to move forward:

1. Buy two 3TB FW drives and daisy-chain them.  Move to 6TB storage which should keep me occupied/happy for the forseeable future (2 years or more).  Worry about next steps when I hit the 6TB limit, wait for technology solutions to advance.

2. Copy my iTunes library over to the 6TB drives, saving the iTunes database and playlist information in case something fails and I have to step backwards.

3. Re-initiate my iTunes database (the "geniuses" assured my that artwork is now stored with the individual files.....but I am hedging my bets (see Step 2 above)).

4. Re-create my Playlists from scratch.  It would probably take me a lazy evening to do so, but I guess that's the price of having a good backup solution and allowing for enough expansion space.

5. Make sure everything is OK, then retire the older drives and put into safe keeping as my backups.  In addition to running out of space, this is why I need to migrate to other disks....because I don't have sufficient backup for much of the music.  Rather than just adding another disk to the mix, this is why I want to "start fresh" with new data storage.

Sooooooo, this seems the way to proceed at this point.  Anyone have any opposing/different views?  Am still open to a better solution if I can find one.

Now, once I get ~4-5TB of music re-constituted, can anyone recommend a reliable Cloud storage solution that won't cost an arm-&-a-leg?  In other words, where can I backup 6TB for approx. $50/year?

Thanks, -dB

[Crimson]

Re: cloud storage, I've used Backblaze in the past, but now prefer Crash Plan's family plan.

[skunark]

RE: Kiss.  So I went to the big Apple Store in Grand Central, NYC this morning and looked for someone knowledgeable (I did find one, BTW).  I got the answer I expected, though not the one I really wanted.  Long story short: it is not possible to maintain detailed control over your iTunes library the way I would like (e.g. I can't migrate half my library to one drive and half to another without some loss of functionality).  In this case, the loss of functionality would be loss of my Playlists.

I've done the two drive thing before, as long as you don't move the files to another disk, all is good.  (i.e. fill up one drive, connect second drive and have iTunes point to that, don't consolidate the library)  I prefer everything in one spot so I can use rsync to clone/copy the entire iTunes directory to a hardrive on a network that is used for playback (via Bryston's BDP-1).  It's not hard to support multiple locations (or drives), just simpler.     

1. Buy two 3TB FW drives and daisy-chain them.  Move to 6TB storage which should keep me occupied/happy for the forseeable future (2 years or more).  Worry about next steps when I hit the 6TB limit, wait for technology solutions to advance.

I've played around with stripping two bus-powered USB drives (raid 0 essentially) that were identical and had issues with Mac OSX keeping everything in sync and had to restore twice before I just gave up and purchased a larger drive.   FW800 is faster, but not sure if it will be any better.    I would probably recommend getting the 6TB drive.

2. Copy my iTunes library over to the 6TB drives, saving the iTunes database and playlist information in case something fails and I have to step backwards.

Did they tell you the best way to migrate your data is to point iTunes to the new location(drive) and then have it consolidate all files to that location?    Consolidation just copies the files so after everything checks out you can retire the old drive or delete the files as you see fit.     (an easy google for the steps btw)

3. Re-initiate my iTunes database (the "geniuses" assured my that artwork is now stored with the individual files.....but I am hedging my bets (see Step 2 above)).

4. Re-create my Playlists from scratch.  It would probably take me a lazy evening to do so, but I guess that's the price of having a good backup solution and allowing for enough expansion space.

Do the consolation and you don't have to worry about 3 or 4...

5. Make sure everything is OK, then retire the older drives and put into safe keeping as my backups.  In addition to running out of space, this is why I need to migrate to other disks....because I don't have sufficient backup for much of the music.  Rather than just adding another disk to the mix, this is why I want to "start fresh" with new data storage.

Sooooooo, this seems the way to proceed at this point.  Anyone have any opposing/different views?  Am still open to a better solution if I can find one.

Now, once I get ~4-5TB of music re-constituted, can anyone recommend a reliable Cloud storage solution that won't cost an arm-&-a-leg?  In other words, where can I backup 6TB for approx. $50/year?

Thanks, -dB

I would recommend backblaze for a single computer.  Crashplan has the family discount but it also requires java and will eat up more resources than a native app (i hate java btw as it's become more closed over the years).  I believe they have a native app in the works.   Also crashplan has been reported to throttles the backups so it will take much longer to do the initial backup.   3-4TB will take a long time for the initial backup with your computer on 24x7.     Carbonite is another option but will cost you 2x a year to backup external drives