The Death Of The External Hard Drive

Oh, yeah. When I first heard music via a Walkman, I thought "Ohhh, nothing can ever get better than this!" Goes to show how little I know.

You were still right in the key sense, though, ie self-contained listening wherever you go.

i still remember the first time i heard a walkman, it was amazing

:-)

Yeah, Ned's right. I hadn't thought of it that way. It's storage systems have changed dramatically.

on those whole I think I will be glad not to worry about whether my tags are right or whether I've backed up recently but I gotta admit that it's fun to geek out over these things too.

It is fun! And gives one a measure of control over how something as personal as your music library is organized.

As for HDs vs the cloud - I'm waiting for the (complete, not fragmented) Celestial Jukebox before I ditch my drives.

I am really, really enjoying being able to catalog, categorize, and look at the 500 gigs of lossless bootlegs I previously had on 125 DVDRs. Accessibility = I will listen to it.

Accessibility = I will listen to it.

Urgent and key, forever.

Man, overall Google are about the biggest Pirates on the planet! Sounds like a good look though. I just have spent the last 2 weeks restoring (successfully, amazingly enough) a RAID drive that had gone south with a ton of great music on it. I would like to put it in a cloud! Can you not mask your IP address to them and then create multiple accounts?!

I'm excited about the new Western USB 3.0 Drive "kits" (1 or 2 TB and includes PCI-E card) with GB/sec throughput. (and probably going to cop one soon!). Had kind of strayed from WD after several bad drives and more bad blocks than East NY, been on the Seagate eSATA internals (cheap and big from MicroCenter).

Also, Otherworld computing has a thing called Voyager that you can dip your eSATA drives in and they mount as (ecch) USB. I got one of those too, and their Universal Drive Adapter is worth getting just to have around if you have a lot of old drives sitting everywhere.

Agreed, nothing short of FULL CELESTIAL JUKEBOX will do, so until then... YES! You have to have more than the KNOWLEDGE that you have something stashed somewhere!

"What if there's some new digital way to hear music faster and in better fidelity?"

...then you could listen to the complete jandek catalogue in twelve minutes.....

Which could be fun.

Anyway, this week I completed ripping my collection (aside from a bit of vinyl) and backed up everything to a further hard drive. The great culling will begin soon.

The other option, rather than culling, would be to decide on and stick to a more thorough metadata / tagging / rating system and then filter your collection via playlists. I only say this because i've gone down the 'backup and cull' road before and have lived to regret it. I spent way a lot of time figuring out what to toss/keep and have since had to get the old HD out, plug it in, search hundreds of gbs for an album and copy it back over to play it again. If you have plenty of HD space, it makes more sense to remove those albums you don't want in your everyday library via metadata/smart playlist filtering. Just a suggestion. It is fun to send shit to the trash bin too. Options!

Ah, no, I didn't mean culling mp3s, I meant culling the bastard huge collection of CDs I still have sitting around. The mp3s are all sitting on a drive (and fully copied on another drive) just where I want them!

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/01/two-terabyte-sd/

http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/3607/empty.jpg

All CDs sold; shelves to be donated somewhere.

New "collection":

http://www.apple.com/imac/
http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/
http://www.itunes.com

Actually, I lied. I have Bitte Orca and that Iron & Wine/Calexico EP from 2005 sitting here, but that's just because I had a gift card to the local record store. I've ripped those CDs, and now I'll be getting rid of them too.

All CDs sold

That's impressive, I can't even give away some of my CDs.

I should clarify: I had already gotten rid of shit like my old Godsmack records from high school a while back, and I had already sold some other stuff a while back, but out of everything I had left I was able to sell most of it, with the exception of a handful of records I just threw out. So, not really "all," I guess. Should've said, "All CDs gone, most of which were sold."

For anyone else thinking of doing this, sell everything worth something on Amazon Marketplace or insert-your-favorite-online-seller here, and take everything else to your local record store, if they buy used. I sold a lot at my local Newbury Comics.

Not being weighted down by two physical media collections (I buy a lot of books too), is awesome. Then again, I'd never be able to go totally digital with my books, so I can totally understand why other people would find my move to an almost 100% digital music collection unthinkable.

those aren't CD shelves, those are just shelves

BENNO
CD/ DVD shelf unit
$44.99

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/10133981

http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/284/cdsa.jpg

Some of my CDs, circa summer 2008. (Plus oldish Radiohead poster and three pages about Wilco from some magazine I can't recall at the moment, all since taken down.)

Can anyone speak to the reliability (or otherwise) of these LaCie "rugged" drives?:

http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-All-Terrain-FireWire-Portable-301371/dp/B0018B5CA8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1278611051&sr=8-1

Earthquake yesterday freaked me out - have my thesis film sitting on G-drives at home but I need a portable backup drive in case anything happens.

admrl at least for your thesis you could do some cloud storage w dropbox or something

I could. I do not understand that stuff well...

admrl, that description sounds like a bunch of crap. The hard drive inside is going to be just as fragile with orange rubber on the enclosure, if not more so because of the heating issues it creates.

That said I have had good results with these lacie HDs ( http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-LaCinema-Multimedia-Portable-301864KUA/dp/B002ZS1CDY/ref=sr_1_8?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1278612477&sr=1-8 ).

I have had bad experiences with LaCie drives all around. The G-Drives are the best I've used, but even those have crapped out on me. Portability and reliability are key here, though I can't spend a fortune. Could spring for a good drive and compromise on storage (might not need 500gb but figured the bigger the drive the more long-term use I might get)

If you are looking for portability I'd get a solid state drive that you don't have to worry about banging around a little bit.

~CLOUD COMPUTING~

How do I get an account at Google Storage?

google storage is for developers iirc

admrl best is to have an off-site backup, as people have said, in the cloud. try carbonite or jungledrive or something

cause like even if you live in the fortress of solitude one day lex luther may break in and steal all your super protected vibration & kryptonite proof hard drives. but if you have a backup in the ~cloud~ you'll still have your naked pictures of wonder woman

OK I will look into this "cloud" thanks

There's nothing special about that LaCie drive, tho' at my IRL job people take that exact model all over, even to Antarctica, without a problem. Until there's a problem. All hard drives with moving parts will fail eventually, usually in the first few months or after four years. Big name manufacturers like LaCie or Western Digital are more reliable than no-name brands, but it doesn't feel that way when your own personal drive fails. That "rugged" model is nice in that it's got the firewire 800 for really good i/o (as with film editing), and it's tiny enough you can keep it well padded in whatever bag you carry it around in. Keep three copies of anything important, at least one of them far away from the others, geographically. A drive like that is good if you are freuqently away from a fast connection, and if you've got gigs and gigs of changes you need to back up.

AHhh yeah I quickly found out Google Storage is for developers. Are there any cloud services for regular dudes like me yet?

Naked pictures of Wonder Woman = Best marketing idea for cloud computing ever!

another option you might look into is to see if anybody out there sells external portable SSDs. no moving parts, but tiny storage spaces, I suppose a 30GB one will set you back around 100, but 30GB should be enough to store all your mission critical thesis stuff on (unless you're a scientist who has TBs and TBs of raw research data on)

All hard drives with moving parts will fail eventually, usually in the first few months or after four years.
qft

Big name manufacturers like LaCie or Western Digital are more reliable than no-name brands

LaCie just makes enclosures, all their hard drives are sourced from OEMs. I think they're usually hitachis or fujitsus or whatever.

RIP. I'll speak of you fondly pics, music, docs

wow... no recovery options?

aw, my sympathies :(

On the plus side, Dom, we live in a magical time. If you want to listen to anything you really don't need it in a little box. For 95% of recorded music its as quick as a google search with the word "mediafire" in it, so just start rebuilding as fast as you can listen.

Man, I was hoping this thread title was a band name.

not if it's music you created!

xp

yeah, it's likely gone for good. luckily (and kind of mysteriously), all of my own music/recording files were spared -- but I basically lost all my mp3s, and pictures I've taken since I moved to san fran :(

I've been thinking about RAR-ing that stuff up with a password and putting it on Amazon's cloud thing or something. Anyone else done this? My hard drives die constantly. I've lost tons of pics and original music over the years, which still breaks my heart to think about it.

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hdd_flooding/

Disk drive shipments are set to plummet by nearly 28 per cent in Q4 – 48 million fewer units than a year ago – in the wake of the devastating flooding in Thailand, says beancounter iSuppli.

The ripple effect of the worst flooding in the country for more than half a century is also likely to be felt across many sectors of IT and other industries, the analyst warned.

"The drop [in hard disk] is the largest sequential decrease on a percentage basis since the fourth quarter of 2008 when shipments fell 21.2 percent during the worst point of the last electronics downturn," said iSuppli.

It estimates 30 per cent of hard disk production will be lost in Q4 as factories are inundated with water, and as a result prices will rise by 10 per cent – which seems a little conservative given the recent swing already seen in the UK.

As has been well documented, the world's largest HDD manufacturer WD has been hit hardest by the rising waters and its market share is forecast to dramatically fall by the end of this year, leaving it in third place, while Toshiba is expected to fall from fourth to fifth.

Disk drives underpin the digital age and shortages will be felt across swathes of the IT industry, while the flooding has also hit car makers.

"In the PC market, the HDD shortage is likely to have the greatest impact on notebook PCs. The specific HDD plants affected by the flooding make devices designed for mobile computers," said iSuppli.

So far Acer has confirmed price rises on the next batch of shipments and rival ASUS revealed yesterday it will run out of disk drives by the end of this month. Other PC vendors have noted the challenges in securing HDDs but have not commented further.

However, current PC stockpiles in the channel following leaner demand this year will shelter biz or retail customers from availability glitches until Q1 next year.

DRAM is likely to feel the strain of a slowing mobile PC market as "any reduction in PC sales due to supply constraints will further depress the already oversupplied DRAM market", said iSuppli.

Some camera makers – including Sony, Nikon and Canon – have been disrupted by the natural disaster in the Far East as have car makers, with Ford, Mazda, Hino, Honda, Isuzu, Mitsubishi, Nissan and Toyota suspending production in Thailand.

my ext hard drive whirrs and clicks and whirrs and clicks and whirrs and clicks and then stops, and my laptop won't recognise it. this is death, yes? is it gonna cost me absolute £££s to get the data off of it?