Ripping my CDs to FLAC, need some hardware advice

[DaveHo]

I've made the decision to start getting away from using physical media. I'm planning to rip my CDs to FLAC with Exact Audio Copy. A Squeezebox Classic will be used for playback on my HT rig. The first step will of course be ripping the 400-500 CDs I have. My plan is to purchase 2 external hard drives, one for active use, & one for a backup. I think 500GB drives should do it. Does anyone have a recomendation on brand for the hard drives? Any advantage to using firewire over USB2.0 for connection to my PC?

Anything else this newb to PC based music should keep in mind? Up until this point I've pretty much shunned everything that isn't disc based. Hell, I don't even own an MP3 player.

-Dave

 

[Adam]

I think that this would be perfect for the new HTPC section.

In terms of external hard drive connections, I'd vote for eSATA. If you don't have those connections on your PC (like I didn't), you can get an adapter quite inexpensively if you have free SATA connections on your motherboard. If you're interested, let me know, and I'll find some links for you.

 

[jamie2112]

Get a 1tb hard drive from Seagate.My buddy who is a computer madman tells me they are the best with the least amount of errors .....

 

[MDS]

I have a 300 GB Maxtor external drive that I use to store the WAVs from my CDs. Really any brand will do but in my experience Seagate drives are the quietest, so if noise is a consideration they are the best choice.

USB is 'host-based' (meaning it requires the help of the CPU to transfer data) so although it is rated to be faster than Firewire, in practice it is not. However, unless your machine is very busy you will not notice any real time speed differences.

 

[jhanley]

I do the same thing. Rip CD's to FLAC and stream them to my AVR via Squeezebox classic. I use a USB connected Western Digital 1TB external drive for the music files. The setup works great and I notice no performance problem with the USB connection serving even large FLAC files.