Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Opinions on future of standalone music hard drives

Sean, that's very interesting. My own interest is in placing exact replicas of CD-files (i.e., uncompressed CD audio files) on a hard drive. I don't want even the higher quality MP3s. My assumption (correct me if wrong) is that this will be facilitated by larger hard drives. Each audio CD, uncompressed, has an exact size, something around 650 MBs if I recall. So my thought is you could get about 150 CDs-worth of uncompressed, CD-audio onto an 80 GB drive (not MP3 "CD-quality," which should be rephrased as "almost CD quality).

Storing DVDs sounds too much ... the storage capacity would have to be so high. What I want to do is store a CD-audio music library on a hard disk.

Birdman

I have thought about this myself, and ultimately just got a mega cd changer because I am lazy and don't feel like building a dedicated machine to serve as my jukebox.

A 74-minute cd holds 650MB, an 80 minute holds 700MB. Taking the ratio of MB/min on the 80 minute cd is slightly less (8.75) than on the 74 minute so lets use that. Since many cds do not occupy the entire disk it is more useful to think about minutes of music stored at cd quality.

(100GB disk)/(8.75MB/min) = ~11,400 min
Assuming cd's average 50 minutes, that's 228 cds. Not too shabby storage really.

Birdman

Based on the research that I have done on Music Servers, that is precisely how the music is stored, uncompressed. Your math is also correct, it is the equivalent of about 125-150 CDs uncompressed.

Sean

I would much rather use a lossless form of compression (such as FLAC) to use my space more efficiently than to store uncompressed audio.

FLAC's compression ratio is around 2:1.

I've been copying to hard drive for quite awhile now and was aniticipating the day when this would become a reality for the mass market. I've got my preamp's record out to an M-Audio Firewire 410 which is attached to a PC. The unit is extremely handy with an optical input/output and coaxial input/output. It also has 2 analog ins!

Based on that math, we would need about 240MB of hd space to be added before ripping all of our present discs.
Eeech.
I don't know if i want to open up the pocketbook for that just yet.

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Based on that math, we would need about 240MB of hd space to be added before ripping all of our present discs.
Eeech.
I don't know if i want to open up the pocketbook for that just yet.

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I think you may have a typo in your reply...if not, I've got an extra 240 MB drive (actually I have a few 540's not doing anything at the moment) lying around here somewhere...you're welcome to one...

WhatFurrer

Most major brand (Maxtor, Seagate, WD) internal drives retail for close to $1 a GB when you look at drives 100GB and up. That means on average you can expect it to cost you maybe $0.60 a disk to store them digitally (ripped as .wav files). (That is, just for the storage space.) Now with something like FLAC you can compress them almost another 50%, which pushes the per disk cost down to pretty much the same cost as buying CD-Rs in bulk on sale ($0.25/disk is pretty reasonable for a sale on a spool of 50 name brand disks, although I have seen less.)

Assuming to put together a relatively cheap dedicated computer to house this you need an additional $300 or so for: case, MoBo, proc., ram, and sound card on top of the cost for storage. It's definately still on the expensive side although not unreasonable for what you get. This system is assuming your mother board has built in LAN and you can upload everything from some other machine to this one, as it will have no cd drive, keyboard, monitor, etc.

There are other things to consider too like data protection (RAID/Backup? increase your storage costs), fan noise (all those hard drives spinning will get hot, water cooling amounts to additional costs), I'm sure I could come up with more but I'm getting lazy.

Wow...that $1/GB part made me feel old. I remember well when people were happy that prices got to $1/MB for hard drives.

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I think you may have a typo in your reply

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Yes indeed i do or did.
240mb would not get me very far at all in saving our 400+ cds.