The Death Of The External Hard Drive

I mean once internet connections get fast enough, i'm sure online storage will replace all this dumb crap

I was kidding about this being the year of cloud computing. It's definitely not there yet.

i just redownload it off emusic if i need it again. it lets you download the same record a billion times if you need it. the future will probaby be more like this

― touch me i'm acoleuthic (Whiney G. Weingarten), Wednesday, January 13, 2010 10:56 AM (2 minutes ago)

Bought a couple records in FLAC from Boomkat, and I can download the files as many times as I need to. Amazon MP3 and iTunes do not let you do this, which is kind of dumb.

i mean, my friend says "don't fall in love with the format" which to be basically means who knows if we'll be listening to MP3s at all in 10 years. What if there's some new digital way to hear music faster and in better fidelity. I'd feel like a chump for all those sleepless nights making sure my D.R.I. and my Dri were in different folders

if u think cloud computing is a common goal
it goes to show how little u know

http://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/cloudsscroll.gifhttp://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/cloudsscroll.gifhttp://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/cloudsscroll.gifhttp://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/cloudsscroll.gifhttp://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/cloudsscroll.gifhttp://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/cloudsscroll.gifhttp://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/cloudsscroll.gifhttp://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/cloudsscroll.gifhttp://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/cloudsscroll.gifhttp://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/cloudsscroll.gif

> Bought a couple records in FLAC from Boomkat, and I can download the files as many times as I need to.

i'm not sure this is true - some things i bought early last year now have no download button, just stars to let me rate them

i mean, my friend says "don't fall in love with the format" which to be basically means who knows if we'll be listening to MP3s at all in 10 years

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.

xpost

I probably bought my stuff four or five months ago, and I just logged in and still have download buttons next to all of the four records. I clicked on one of them and it started to downloaded.

yeah but yr a sock

;)

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.

xpost -- sounds involved but worth it, of course. Pricing is obviously my key concern. (Keep in mind that I'm planning on a computer upgrade later in the year, so that has priority.)

This is intriguing.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/29/connected-data-transporter-sync/

Am trying to make my internal SSD as slim as possible. Current hurdle: iPhoto library.

ew