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Dear LJ, What Storage Method Do I Want?
Okay, so like, I have somewhere on the order of 800 CDs or so, and unlike most of the world, I haven't really ripped any of them to mp3.
Suddenly I am feeling like it would be a really good idea to rip many of them. I don't intend to get rid of the CDs themselves, but it would be nice to have them all in digital format.
However, I don't really have room for all of them on my hard drive. I estimate on an average what, 50-100MB per album, depending on quality... I'd need around 80 GB if I actually ripped the entire collection.
So, I've figured the following are my options:
1) Rip them, burn them to DVDs. It'd take like 20 DVDs. I don't like this plan, it feels like they'd still take up a lot of space and it'd be easy to lose one and there goes 40 of my CDs or whatever.
2) Get an external hard drive. I went to Best Buy and could have gotten one of these (160 GB Western Digital "My Book") for example, for $80. It'd certainly do the trick, though it's sort of big and clunky, and part of the point is that I'd like to make my music collection transportable.
3) Get an external itsy-bitsy hard drive -- like this 120 GB SimpleTech drive, which is barely bigger than my cellphone, no joke. The only reason I didn't just go ahead and get this one in the store was that I was sad that when we were there a month ago, it was $99, and now it's $150, so I wanted to think about it a bit and shop online to see if there was a better deal somewhere.
4) Get an 80GB iPod. There's a good chance I should probably do that anyway, and I'd hopefully be able to talk one of my friends at Apple into getting me a discount. BUT -- I'm not sure it'd suffice for what I want solely, and I bet I'd be tempted to do something stupid like erase half of my music to put some TV shows on it and then where would I be?
The more I think about it the more I'm mentally tending towards 3) and 4) combined... but I guess I was curious what the rest of the world thinks I should do, since I know a lot of you also have tons of CDs.
Suddenly I am feeling like it would be a really good idea to rip many of them. I don't intend to get rid of the CDs themselves, but it would be nice to have them all in digital format.
However, I don't really have room for all of them on my hard drive. I estimate on an average what, 50-100MB per album, depending on quality... I'd need around 80 GB if I actually ripped the entire collection.
So, I've figured the following are my options:
1) Rip them, burn them to DVDs. It'd take like 20 DVDs. I don't like this plan, it feels like they'd still take up a lot of space and it'd be easy to lose one and there goes 40 of my CDs or whatever.
2) Get an external hard drive. I went to Best Buy and could have gotten one of these (160 GB Western Digital "My Book") for example, for $80. It'd certainly do the trick, though it's sort of big and clunky, and part of the point is that I'd like to make my music collection transportable.
3) Get an external itsy-bitsy hard drive -- like this 120 GB SimpleTech drive, which is barely bigger than my cellphone, no joke. The only reason I didn't just go ahead and get this one in the store was that I was sad that when we were there a month ago, it was $99, and now it's $150, so I wanted to think about it a bit and shop online to see if there was a better deal somewhere.
4) Get an 80GB iPod. There's a good chance I should probably do that anyway, and I'd hopefully be able to talk one of my friends at Apple into getting me a discount. BUT -- I'm not sure it'd suffice for what I want solely, and I bet I'd be tempted to do something stupid like erase half of my music to put some TV shows on it and then where would I be?
The more I think about it the more I'm mentally tending towards 3) and 4) combined... but I guess I was curious what the rest of the world thinks I should do, since I know a lot of you also have tons of CDs.
no subject
Big external hard drives (or regular internal hard drives and a USB-enclosure) are cheap. Don't just buy a disk big enough for your music collection, as you will likely have good use for the extra space (for backing up your computer, or maybe eventually for video, etc). Right now a 160GB disk costs around $80 (or 50 cents per gig) while a 500GB disk costs about $130 (or 33 cents per gig).
Also, I personally wouldn't worry about the physical size of the hard drive or its portability. Almost all external drives are small enough that you can easily carry it in a backpack with other things. If you're leaning toward getting an IPod anyway, it will take care of your portability needs.
And finally, something that I don't think anyone else has commented upon: Hard drives are fragile -- even the portable ones used in laptops and the big hard-drive-based IPods. I think I take good care of my personal property, and I still drop my cell phone once or twice per year. If you buy and regularly use an IPod, you are likely to eventually drop it, too. Your IPod will last a lot longer if it doesn't have a fragile portable hard drive in it. Do you need to carry your full music collection with you all the time, or would a big flash-drive-based IPod be sufficient? The Nanos are currently 8 GB, I expect 16 GB Nanos soon, and they last a lot longer than anything with a hard drive.
no subject