100 GB holds approximately 300 CDs encoded with FLAC. The slimserver database for such an installation is approximately 38 MB.
Yes. Your operating system can remain on your existing hard drive, and the new drive can be dedicated to holding music. If your PC case has an empty bay to hold the additional drive and your PC power supply has available 12V plugs, you are in business.
Each has its strengths.
Interior drives are cheaper, generate less noise, are easier to cool, and do not require additional wall power plugs.
Exterior drives are mobile which means they are good for holding backups of your data. If you are not computer savvy, exterior drives offer simpler installation than opening your computer and messing with its internals.
Firewire 800 is faster than USB 2.0, and USB 2.0 is faster than USB 1.1. Some users have reported slow slimserver import performance using USB 1.1. If you have an older laptop and want to use USB with an external drive, PCMCIA USB 2.0 cards are inexpensive.
Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a drive enclosure that is connected to the network instead of a specific PC. These devices usually have built in RAID and a web interface. Examples include Buffalo Terastation, Infrant ReadyNAS, and Netgear Storage Central (reference).
Today these devices use wired Ethernet connections to reduce costs. You can take a wired model and buy a wireless bridge device to connect it to your wireless network.
RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. RAID has different levels which provide concatenation of disks and fault tolerance. The data is written across more than one disk drive so that if one of the drives fails, the remaining drives can still function while the failed drive is replaced.
Mirroring is the same thing as RAID level 1 and consists of two physical drives that are updated with the same read/write operations. If one drive fails, there is an identical drive that can keep going until the faulty drive is replaced.
RAID can be implemented in many ways: your computer's motherboard, a separate card that plugs into a slot in your computer, an exterior drive enclosure, or even in software using your operating system. When you implement RAID in hardware, the RAID controller must initialize the disks before writing data to the array. That usually means the disks are reformatted. The moral of the story is to setup your RAID array before putting your music collection on disk.
Fault tolerance is not the same thing as a backing up your data. For example, if you accidentally erase an album from your music collection, the data will be dutifully erased from every drive in the fault-tolerant drive array. It pays to backup your data to a separate device.
Long enough for them to fail. It is not a question of if they will fail, it is a question of when. You can do your best to provide good cooling and surge suppression, but eventually the drives will fail. There is no hard and fast rule, but you can expect them to fail sometime between now and 6 years.
You can backup to magnetic tape.
You can backup to a lot of DVDs.
You can backup to a separate drive.
You can mirror the drives and remember not to infect your PC with malware, accidentally delete anything, and hope your house never floods, burns down, or becomes burglarized.
You have many things to consider: storage, backup, heat, and power. The bigger your collection, the more you won't want to re-rip your CDs if a drive fails, so tape backup starts to make sense.
As an example, a RAID 5 array with four 500 GB drives would yield:
3/4 * (4 * 500 GB) = 1500 GB effective storage
That is approximately 4200 CDs. It would take slimserver a long time to catalog a collection that size, let alone the time it would take you to rip that many CDs.
Most normal people can live happily with RAID 1. The economics are cheaper with reasonably sized CD collections.
5400 rpm drives generate less noise and heat than 7200 rpm drives, but 5400 rpm is dying out in the marketplace.
Practically speaking, there is no performance difference between 2 MB and 8 MB cache sizes when used in a consumer RAID application.
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