[Robert57]

OWC just announced today that it is now shipping its highly regarded single external drive Mercury Elite Pro "Quad" HD in 1 TB size for $599, with USB and Firewire connections They have an external PS and no fan, relying on airflow in its alum. enclosure for cooling, so they are very quiet. I did check out the 750 GB version of this OWC Mercury drive when I visted a friend's house recently and was surprised that one can still hear the faint whirring of the drive mechanism from a few feet away, even with no cooling fan, so it's not perfectly quiet. But it is MUCH quieter than a multi-drive RAID enslosure with a cooling fan (like the Infrant Ready NAS).

I'm thinking of getting two of these external drives, one as a back-up, to store my 1600 CD's in Apple Lossless and /or FLAC, with plenty of room to grow. I would connect the drives via firewire to a Mac Mini running SlimServer to multple SB2's over a wireless network.  I am putting off the expense of a wired ethernet network throughout my home, hoping the new Apple Airport Extreme wireless N router gives me plenty of range. But with such a large drive I feel this is a very speedy, secure and flexible approach, with ample room to grow my music library.

I called OWC today and learned they use Hitachi's new 1 TB drive inside. Seagate has not come out with their 1 TB yet. The sales guy at OWC (Tony, who is quite helpful) assured me the new drive is no noisier than the 750 GB drives they have been using for some time. Hitachi rates the drive as suitable for "network storage servers" and serious gaming, and they do not have a more rugged "enterprise quality" category or grade.  I have read separately that Hitacjhi's 1 TB drives use 5 plattens, whereas Seagate is trying to stuff all the bits onto 4 . Perhaps this would make a difference in noise or reliabilty. Hitachi offers a 5-year warranty, like Seagate, and seems to be at least as reliable as Seagate generally, according to OWC. These OWC Mercury Elite drives come with ProSoft Data Back-up software and work with both Mac OS and Windows. Tony at OWC told me they are also working on a NAS version as well (for ethernet LAN connection), but could give me no timeframe.

http://maclist.macsales.com/pr/newsletter/1178039758.html

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/

Can anyone suggest a better solution to store a large library, with a very quiet external HD? Since the cooling fan is not needed for these new aluminum single drives, I can't imagine I'll find a quieter solution with a third party enclosure. I figure that even with a NAS RAID storage I'd still need a large drive like to back-up anyway.

I thought others contemplating how to store their growing music libraries would be interested in this new drive technology, esp. if they are Mac oriented. OWC's products especially designed for easy Mac set-up.

Rob

[jqp]

I see the need for lots of storage in the future of anyone who wants to store their media off of the original disks

This seems to be a great drive from what I have read. I got the 500GB My Book for $179, then of course saw it for $169 a week later

802.11n may be fast enough to wirelessly stream audio reliably, not sure about video. But that is the new standard that they say is really required to do all this streaming wirelessly. In any case building up a good buffer of data that has been streamed is what you want.

As for NAS, I don't like that solution nearly as much as DAS which is basically what you are doing. Network contention on a home LAN and the need for huge throughput do not always get along

Firewire is best if you can do that - less drain on the CPU and just a better protocol. My MyBook is only USB, but I am not using it to stream, just to give me more space.

Fanless drives like this are not new, I have a few. You could easily fry a drive if the internal drive does not transfer heat to the case the way yours hopefully does. This can happen when you buy a cheap external enclosure for one of yuor 3.5" drives and they did not engineer it well So your case should be pretty warm if it is doing its job...

They will also make some noise because the case also conducts the noise very well!

I will probably do DAS using eSata for my media serving. And you should be able to move your external storage away from your listening area, use efficient heatsinks, very quiet slower fans. How available and convenient this is to us consumers is another question.