Thanks Chris, I have only about 30 decent quality WAV albums currently a few of which I think are 24/92 or 196. I guess these are downsampled somehow if burnt to a CD.
Anyhow will be quite a while before I get to 2400 albums. I mostly get them as “free” downloads when I buy an LP from Bandcamp for example.
As it would appear that just about any of the auxiliary drives available will do the job, then perhaps reliability should be the main consideration. Any particular brands/models to avoid?
Remember that Hi-Res albums can be much larger than regular 16/44, so they will eat storage space quite quickly.
For USB drives, I tend to use cheap WD portable HDDs such as MyPassport. Recertified ones direct from WD online are cheap, and I try to make sure I have more than one backup copy. I figure that the most reliable hard drive you can buy still gives you no protection against things like fire, flood or theft.
The bus powered drive reference simply relates to the fact that the drive gets power from the USB socket on the computer and does not need a separate power supply (the passport and element drives I have all get power over USB and don’t need a separate power supply). Some (mostly older) portable hard drives needed power from 2 USB sockets and had an extra non-data USB cable for this purpose.
Streamers should generally simply ignore files they don’t know how to handle properly such as photos/video.
Some streamers may have a limit on the number of tracks they can catalogue - I forget what this figure is for the Naim streamers.
While it’s certainly sensible to leave some space on a boot drive/system disc where temporary files/system activity and certain housekeeping tasks will need space, I’ve rarely found this an issue on non-boot drives reserved purely for data which I’ve merrily filled up leaving only a few MB to spare, perhaps I’ve been lucky to date.
Yes I have mostly “CD Quality” WAV files with just a few “Hi res” but this is academic currently as I am simply burning to CD. Point noted though about the extra capacity these use.
Thanks
I’ve seen a 2tb Seagate model that is powered from a seperate 12v supply. Would this work better as there is no power demand from the USB socket?
Thanks
I’ve seen a 2tb Seagate model that is powered from a seperate 12v supply. Would this work better as there is no power demand from the USB socket?
Thanks
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I’d be rather surprised if that Seagate model was a ‘portable’ hard drive which generally use the smaller drives found in laptops.
If it is powered with a PSU it is more likely to be a larger ‘desktop’ drive in an external enclosure.
I used to use external desktop drives a lot more, but, they can be much noisier, use more power and a mains socket, as well as taking up a lot more room. They may be marginally faster.
These days, especially as the smaller form factor drives have excellent capacity for the cost, I feel they can rival the larger ones quite happily for most applications. For audio or video files there will be no problem with data transfer rates from a portable drive and I use them almost exclusively these days with my Macs - I even have some which I boot from though these days normally boot my 2012 Mini from a USB 3 external SSD.
I can see that one on the ‘River’ store for just under £60, but the 4TB is only £25 more. Appreciate you may not want that much, but 4TB seems to be the sweet spot price wise for these. There’s also a ‘playstation special edition for PC/playstaion’ in 4TB for just under £80.
Yes the river store is where I was browsing.
Pricewise little between Seagate, WD, Toshiba or Maxtor?
Any of these particularly stand out from the others?
Thanks
Entirely agree - I’ve gravitated towards the Elements series over the years - no frills and a nice plain design. I have a couple of USB 3 Seagate drives too which have also been fine, though on one the USB connection on the drive seemed to have a bit too much ‘play’.
I think the Toshibas are also well regarded. Years ago used Maxtors in desktop PCs - they were ok, perhaps a more budget option, but I had one failure on one of the few occasions I’d not recently backed up so avoided them thereafter but all drives can fail. From memory Toshiba bought out IBMs drive business years ago (anyone remember the infamous ‘deathstars’ (deskstars)?), and Maxtor were acquired by Seagate.
My vote would be for the WD Elements first of all as I have several, I’d probably opt for Seagate otherwise - I have several dozen portable external drives as my backup strategy for photos etc became haphazard with copies of copies of copies on separate drives but not in a particularly organised manner I’m sad to say.
For me personally the Elements were often just best value for the capacity, but if there were offers I’d try the Seagates when they were cheaper.
Just choose the capacity you need, and get one, the price differentials are not huge in hi-fi terms.
I think these are discontinued - used to have a T3 and now have a few T5 SSD models. Very neat/small form factor and I use them as external boot drives on a Mac Mini and the SSD is much faster than using the internal hard drive.
The T5s are fine drives with conventional USB and USB C leads for backwards compatibility, but in trems of value/capacity the hard drives beat them hands down if you need the capacity, though can’t see it being too long before this evens out…
A black 1TB T5 is £154 on the river, the 2TB models £350+ from 3rd parties.
If high capacity is not needed they may be a good option (blue 500GB £93).
One further question if I may;
Is it better to store the files on the portable hard drive in the zip files they are usually delivered in, or extract the files into another folder first?
Thanks again
Naurally the computer or any streamers would not be able to play the files without unzipping them into folders first, but I have a habit of unzipping and keeping the zip file backed up either on the portable drive where it’ll be ignored or elsewhere (other drives, NAS - more than 1 copy normally).
Depending on the format the zips might not save much space or even take up a little more (Apple lossless or lossless compressed FLAC), though I think WAVs should compress to some extent.
The main thing is to have a few copies of the download in different places.
Sometimes metadata isn’t right and needs editing - in this situation you’re probably better off storing copies of the corrected tracks.
I guess there is also a risk of a larger zip file becoming corrupted at some stage, which could render many tracks unrecoverable rather than one if a smaller file is affected.
Decompressing zip files won’t take appreciably longer on an external drive unless the computer has an SSD inside and the external is a mechanical drive, though download speeds would tend to be far more limiting for most of us.
Thanks Alley,
Similarly I keep both zipped and unzipped folders on my laptop memory. I understand the files need to be extracted/unzipped to play or burn to disc.
What I’m not sure of, is if I just transferred zip files to the portable drive and later on wanted to play them via a streamer or DAC/Laptop or tablet option would the streaming device be able to play direct from the zip file or in any case do they need to be extracted first?
