wondering what most do ?

[Jay481985]

First you wanted a question to be answered. I gave my opinion that hard drives fail. I tried to courteous to you by not boring you with the nitty gritty. Hard drives are broken down into a few categories. SSD which I doubt you have have a different standard. But for normal HDD there are two categories: consumer market and server market. The server market I believe have at least a factor of 10 most likely 100 times more befor their failures. The consumer market hard drives see failure typically around year 5 but then again with all electronics you see a bathtub scale of failures. To visualize that think of an old bathtub that is U shaped. So you get a lot of failures in the begining and a lot at the end of life. That is one big reason I suggest to you that hard drives fail. Many can do fine out of the box for a few day and then all of a sudden you hear the click of death. That absolutely sucks as you just spent all your time and effort to rip all your cds and the information is lost now. That is why when I transfer vital information it is back up in three places and two of them are of known hard drives >1 year of reliability but < 3. Depending on the size of the file I also tend to email it to myself as emails are cloud based servers that have a much lower failure point than even your home computer.

Another thing to note is that portable hard drives and laptop hard drives (if your portable hard drive is powered only by your computer its a laptop hard drive) their MTBF is much less than even consumer 3.5 inch HDD. It is expected that more vibration and movement on a laptop based hard drive.

When you suggested that cds fail, I asked if it was cd-r or actual cds. You did not answer either. You should read the differences between recordable cd-r and why they fail due to their organic dye substrate while cds made by companies don't because they are pressed. That method is as reliable as clay tablets from syria. Still totally readable today after 5000 years.

It seems that you already made up your mind before you even posted this thread that you were going to sell off your cds since you nearly finished transfering all your cds to your computer. I think all you wanted were high fives, that's awesome man comments. And someone inevitably to buy your cds.

As for the fighting, it was all directed to Gilbert and none to you what so ever but if you took it that way oh well, I cannot help you then. Gilbert offered the wrong answer and I said absolutely wrong. I bet you Gilbert got the same answer from his IT department as well.

And lastly.

Nice quote to prove my point. You are offering

nothing that pertains to the question asked, and in fact my responses

are a waste of time but i wander where all the intellectual types would

be without all us laborous rubes to keep them healthy and alive. Ive

dealt with a few so called self proclaimed intellectuals in my labors

and more often than not they fail miserably.(point being that intellect

takes many forms) You read your books and debate about it all day long

and ill be in the trenches getting the job done.

When

your called to the gate as we all will be one day i wonder if your

intellectual supperiority will get you any further ? Theres nothing

wrong with being educated and intelligent in fact im all for it.I want

my children to go much further in school than what was afforded me. The

problem starts when you act and feel superior

I really don't think you get the meaning of the quote at all..... What trenches? What books? This is all information that I learned through simple failures of computers and technology. If you honestly believe that I read this stuff through a book you are sadly sadly mistaken.

And if you are referencing god (I don't even know how this occured) how silly is this debate getting. You just really wanted a pat on your back and not want to hear any constructive criticism. If anything you are thin skinned. Welcome to the internet please don't ever go here you will be eaten alive.

http://boards.4chan.org/b/

[joessportster]

not looking for accolades, i could care less what anyone thinks of me, and im as far from thin skinned as people get. Where i work thin skin gets you crushed on a daily basis. my initial post was exactly what i stated and had your initial response contained some of the info you just posted i would have given it much more weight in my considerations. I tend to blow off the 1 liners as i dont generally have time for crap. (in my experience about 99% of the 1 liners are looking for a nibble to start a back and forth flame)

Now that you have clarified some of what your initial intent was would you care to elaborate on which hard drives have a reputation of reliability. and my cpu im downloading to is a sony vaio laptop. And how on earth would i email myself a file containing nearly 10000 songs ?

[Jay481985]

not looking for accolades, i could care less what anyone thinks of me, and im as far from thin skinned as people get. Where i work thin skin gets you crushed on a daily basis. my initial post was exactly what i stated and had your initial response contained some of the info you just posted i would have given it much more weight in my considerations. I tend to blow off the 1 liners as i dont generally have time for crap. (in my experience about 99% of the 1 liners are looking for a nibble to start a back and forth flame)

Now that you have clarified some of what your initial intent was would you care to elaborate on which hard drives have a reputation of reliability. and my cpu im downloading to is a sony vaio laptop. And how on earth would i email myself a file containing nearly 10000 songs ?

You can't send yourself 10000 songs. First wav files are much bigger than compressed files and most emails limit to 10 megs a song. Second I would suggest cloud storage but most cloud storage for storage reasons do not allow for wav files or will automatically compress wav files to mp3 or thus negating all the work you just did. (What cloud service does is it matches similar files other customers put up and marked it as yours so there is really one file that everyone streams or redownloads instead of a 1000 of the same file on the same server taking up 1000 slots that could be marked down to one. This is somewhat similar to what mp3 does as well.

A sony vaio is fine. Well I never brought one and they are not great or bad (usually expensive) but I have no idea what hard drive they contain unless you look at the innards. Is it a 7200 rpm or 5400 rpm? Do you have the specs around? And as I said Laptop hard drives do not have the same reliability as desktop models due to shock, vibration, coffee spills etc that all come with laptops and their inherent risks.

Another issue you might want to consider is are you always going to update? Most people say yeah I am going to backup my computer monthly. Yeah that's nice in theory but in reality people forget and its a year already. The computer fails and you say well I have a backup. Guess what, the file you really need was saved 5 days ago and you lost now 1 year worth of photos and music and video you will never be able to recover.

You say oh well I will keep the backup always on my computer now its attached to the laptop and running. It is wearing down with the same time as your laptop hd. Also remember that heat is the biggest issue with hard drives. People cram them in airless spaces or whoops did the dog just run into the cable and pull the laptop and your backup with it to meet its doom by crashing into the floor? Uh oh! Or if a power surge hits both systems are now down.

And of late with freak storms, okay my backup is in the basement. Did the basement just uh oh flood? Okay did you put it in an watertight case like a Pelican or waterproof safe, now the issue of did I remember to update it this month comes around.

Another thing to take issue, many hard drive companies are based in Thailand and in 2010/2011 they had massive flooding and hard drive prices went up while reliability went down. Seagate used to be a good company with the best waranty but remember they do not cover the cost of recovering the data. They will send you a refurbished drive as a replacement.

Honestly I say keep the cds. In fact do what you are doing rip them and put them in a caselogic case (they hold up to 500cds or so with the artwork cases can be brought) and then put them in a pelican case or an water tight case in case of flooding. Then you don't have to rebuild your music list incase a flooding or so happens.

I am honestly buying used cds from amazon and amazon prime gives me free shipping (I pay about 3-4 dollars a mint cds) and rip them to my computer even though I have other means of downloading them even in FLAC.

BTW how many cds do you actually have? Whats the approximate size of all of them now?

[Rivernuggets]

Hi Joe,

I have a little over 1500 cds and will probably keep them. Haven't had the urge to rip them all onto a hard drive yet. Whenever I do transfer them all over, I'd want to keep the original cds just in case.

-Lyle

[joessportster]

I took a look at several posts earlier today and saw tons of comments about hard drive un reliability.

I went to walmart and picked up a VAULTZ cd storage hard case (like a mini briefcase) It held 128 cd's but had room to add enough sleeves so that it now holds 160 cd's for about 33.00 all in, ive already decided im keeping all my single cd's and selling the box sets,(i cant bring myself to put box sets in these cases and discard the boxes, just seems like a huge loss of value)

I hate those cases and found long ago cd's get scratched sliding them in and out. I figure since im ripping lossless i hope to rarely have to open a case much less take out the cd's so no scratches from constant in and out of sleeves.

My vaio has a 600gb hard drive which is down to 293 right now and i have about 150 more cd's to rip, im still going to buy a hard drive i figure 1tb should do. I dont get to spend much on music anymore so filling it would take years

my plan is to put all my music on the backup and update it maybe quarterly so it wont get much runtime yearly ( maybe 10 or 20 hours a year ) i dont keep many pics on my computer i tend to keep those on cards and thumb drives so doubt ill be backing those up on a hard drive, i also dont really keep any other files on computers mainly used to look at various forums amazon, craigslist etc... and now store music

It really is too convenient to have 1200 albums at your fingertips, just plug in the sennheiser hd650 and tune out the world for a bit

[Jay481985]

Well glad you took some of the advice.

I think if you could you should buy two terabyte or more hard drives. Keep them in separate places. Also given that cds are 800 megs a piece or less you are down to 293 - ~120 gigs you will be down to ~173 gigs or from your 583 gig (true space) to ~29% space left. Thats fine and dandy but add a computer game or two and your computer will slow down a lot. With photos, I suggest that you upload them to a cloud system such as google + or even facebook (just set the album privacy setting to only allow you to see them) They may not be the best format or full size but at least you can still have them in case your computer/camera/etc goes bad. You can even upload them easily to sites such as flicker tumblr or I prefer imgur. SD Cards get lost, formatted, or fail.

[joessportster]

any brand reccomendations for hard drives, from my reading im gathering its just luck of the draw and price is not a reflection of quality

Joe

[Fish]

I think you did the best thing keeping those cd's. I ripped my 1000 or so years ago but still prefer to play the cd when critical listening at home.

[Jay481985]

any brand reccomendations for hard drives, from my reading im gathering its just luck of the draw and price is not a reflection of quality

Joe

I assume you want an external hard drive? Would you rather a laptop external hard drive or a traditional 3.5 inch hard drive. The laptop hard drive can be powered only by the usb cord (one cord for power and data transfer) while the 3.5 inch needs to be plugged into the computer and wall. The 3.5 will be faster though as its 7200 rpm versus 5400 unless they put a hybrid in there. You need to read the specs.

Also how about trying two different companies? I have had luck with western digital and seagate for the most part. I don't non hard drive companies selling external hard drives.

[Rich_Guy]

I keep my music collection on two computers and it's backed up on a separate hard drive on both computers as well.

I still keep my CD's as well in case there is ever a problem and I have had problems in the past and needed to re-copy my entire collection before, although I am much better backed up now than in the past. I've learned to always have important info very well backed up, it saves both a lot of time and a lot of things from being permanently lost.

As mentioned it is illegal to sell the media and keep the copies you've made.

[Marvel]

FYI:

Seagate owns Maxtor and Samsung HD brands. (Maxtor had previously acquired Quantum)

Western Digital owns Hitachi HD brands. (you will notice they physically look the same)

I've had fairly good results with most of the current offerings available.

Bruce

[joessportster]

thanks for all the suggestions, now to finish the last 150 or so discs

[Gilbert]

Hey Gilbert how you been? Im about 70 percent thru with the rip, when finished im off to buy an external hard drive and make the backup. I have a good lead on selling the collection as a whole after im done. There is definately an emotional connection here as it takes years to put a collection togeather but space is of a premium for me now and i dont have the funds for storage units my next chore is to learn about FLAC right now im ripping to WAV lossless. My computer knowledge is severly limited.

Doing good Joe, thanks.

I know it's a little too late, since you're about done, but for ripping, I used CDex to get most of my CD's to FLAC. CDex is or was extremely popular software, and was developed specifically for ripping purposes. It's likely still very popular, since it is quality software and best of all, it's Free. Anyway, after I learned about dBpoweramp (about $38 now-a-days) I'd been using it for all my audio ripping since.

For PC playback I use Foobar2000... I'm probably fooling myself, but I think playback quality is better than either iTunes or Windows Media Player. Foobar's down right good software, and it's Free.

[Thaddeus Smith]

I will happily serve as an offsite storage facility for FLAC. I promise not to put a dime on the needle and wear out your files. [6]