So its great to rip cds etc but how safe are those hard drives?
for no apparent reason my mac mini died and the external hard drive now "Shows" 12 rather than 150 folders of artists music.... Luckily i'd backed up about 75% on another extra hard drive.
The "dead" external one has a seagate 500gb drive in - supposedly a good make.
The tech guy at the apple store couldn't recommend anything as being 100%
Whilst there are warranties ...data recovery in these instances is not included and an expensive extra service
Thank god i didn't sell/give away any CDs or ever will
Posted on: 17 December 2011 by Simon-in-Suffolk
Hi, as you have read, mirroring the drives is simple and effective for ripped CDs.
The CD itself is the ultimate backup, some of my CDs date back to 1986 and our still error free. I stream to my network player from a consumer NAS that uses two 1TB western digital disks in a mirrored config. The disks are balaced, which was a small premium, but cause less vibration and increase reliability. So my failure recovery options in diminishing order of likelihood:
1 disk corruption. Recover automatically from mirror
2 disk failure. Recover automatically from mirror
3 catastrophic NAS failure/destruction. Recover from CD by reripping
Simon
