A couple months ago, I wrote about the advantages of maintaining a large digital music library, specifically with regards to cost and storage as compared to maintaining a large physical music library. One of my points was that the decreasing prices of hard drives makes it increasingly easy to store, as well as backup large quantities of high-quality music.
I even went so far as to say that “before too long” we’d see the $200 terabyte, which is roughly enough storage for 80 continuous days of lossless quality music plus a complete backup of it all.
Well, that day has arrived. OfficeDepot currently is listing a Western Digital My Book 500GB for $99 after mail-in rebate.
At that price, you might as well get two and secure all your digital media.
You knew I would chime in here, didn’t you?
Extremely loud (this mother vibrates so much that using it as a live disk instead of a mere backup one becomes next to impossible), the first release over here used proprietary drivers (no idea if this was fixed), and several have been returned to my local PC shop because they were no more after a relatively short time. The latter surprised me because WD is what I use internally and they work like a charm. On top of that, support is apparently horrible. Needs Firewire to really run up to speed.
I’ll wait for better solutions.
😉
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tunequest Reply:
May 29th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
I suspected you might show up… 🙂
I’m surprised to read about your difficulties. I’ve been looking into new drives for a while and most of the reviews I’ve read of this one have been generally positive, almost effusive. So much so that I’m nearly ready to plunk down and consolidate three drives into one.
But I agree Firewire would be great. The premium version offers it, but you won’t find 500GB Firewire for that price for a while I think.
Who knows though, maybe by the end of the year, those terabyte Hitachi drives will be looking attractive.
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I didn’t buy one of these, so some of the problems I’ve heard about are no skin off my nose. A colleague has two, had to replace one. Otherwise, so far (he’s only had them for two weeks) he’s happy with them … although he runs them on USB and says they’re deadly slow. He only uses them as backup, so fine.
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tunequest Reply:
May 30th, 2007 at 10:55 am
Yep, for any real work, Firewire is the way to go. Though for listening to music and period transfers to an iPod, USB 2 is more than sufficient.
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