Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[jough]

So I finally got around to buying a large external FireWire/USB 2.0 hard drive to complement my notebook's paltry 20Gb drive - I'm using it for backup and to store captured video, which tends to the biggish, but mostly I got it so I could put my entire MP3 collection on one drive and have all of my music always accessible.

With 250Gb extra space to play around with, I won't be filling it for quite some time.  Seven years of MP3 collecting has only garnered me a bit over 100Gb, and I have a bit of redundancy (re-ripping albums at a higher bitrate, etc.).

But copying over 5-6 year old CD-Rs has shown that they don't necessarily hold up so well.  Lately I've been getting these "Cyclical Redundancy Check Failure" and "Invalid MS-DOS function" erros when blasted XP tries to read some of these discs.  The failures usually occur when trying to copy files lower in the alphabet - i.e. towards the end of the disc (assuming that they were written on the disc in order).

Anyway, I have a dozen discs, many of which hold music from CDs that have been themselves damaged, lost, or sold.

So I'm missing out on some music thanks to the crappiness and impermanence of the CD-R format.  I was sad at the loss before, but now I"m just angry that these damn things don't last so long.  I mean, I rely on these damn discs to back up data.

Jesus Tiberius Christ I'm angry.

God dammit.

God bastard dammit to FUCK!

[CortJstr]

I've actually heard this same story a few times lately. With some people it's because they did silly things like stored them horizontally or wrote on them with regular pens but some are just falling apart all on their own because of cheap glue or whatever.

What ripper/encoder do you use? You might want to give EAC a shot since it was designed for damaged discs.

[slink]

I have problems with that on occasion.
Some CDs just aren't well produced. The best tip is to try another CDROM. Usually that will do the trick for me. And I find that Audiograbber does seem to fault less that most other rippers.

[jough]

Well, I microwave them for about 20 seconds and then bend them with my hand and I was able to recover seven of the unreadable (or partially unreadable) discs, and I always kept a "master list" of what was on each CD so I could find the songs I wanted - so if I really had to I could borrow, re-rip, or download the tracks/albums I needed.

I also, as I said, would often re-rip things, so I sometimes have a better version of an album on another disc.

It's not a tragedy, but it's one of those annoyances, when I consider that I have a LOT of burned CDs with archived data that may or may not be available the next time I need one of them.

The upshot is that for the past two years I've been too lazy to make disc labels for anything - so the ones that just have a title on them in Sharpie marker all seem to be fine.

I had another set of discs that I stored horizontally, on a spindle, and those discs seem fine - I guess the pressure of the discs kept them from going concave like the ones that were stored in jewel cases did.

Anyway, I finally got 99% copied over and it's really really sweet to have access to all of this data at once.

And I still have over 100Gb free.

[slink]

If I wasn't such an internal monkey I might seriously consider such a thing.
Could just cart it with the laptop for gigs I guess which would be handy. Since I only have 30gb free on the laptop and more than 30gb of music to take with me for any gig.

All my cd's which tend to be on spindles have been fine for ages. It's that or a big CD booklet I stole off a DJ. It's not so good though.

Good tip for mending scratches, is a cloth and toothpaste, and you can wear the scratch away without affecting anything. Only works of course if the scratch is in the plastic layer alone, not the metal.

[CortJstr]

I've never been big on burning CDs except for mixes and stuff I get off of eMusic. I figure between my HD, external backup drive, and my soon to be iPod my mp3's should all be pretty safe.

[jough]

For a long time I had a very small hard drive on my laptop, so I tended to archive ALL media files (movies, music, images, etc.) to CD-Rs.  I made multiple copies of anything important, but the music was hard to get to when I wanted to find something quickly that I could load onto my MP3 player on my way out of the house.

My new laptop has a bigish hard drive, but still nowhere near what I'd need (i.e. 200Gb+).

I already have a lot of stuff on it that I could probably cull out if I needed the space, but with plenty of free space there's no reason not to have both of Neil Diamond's Christmas albums at the ready.

[andalucia]

I already have a lot of stuff on it that I could probably cull out if I needed the space, but with plenty of free space there's no reason not to have both of Neil Diamond's Christmas albums at the ready.

Are BOTH really necessary?

[AugustWest]

I already have a lot of stuff on it that I could probably cull out if I needed the space, but with plenty of free space there's no reason not to have both of Neil Diamond's Christmas albums at the ready.

Are BOTH really necessary?

For my money, there are two must have Christmas albums -- Neil Diamond's and Barbra Streisand's.

[Bozack]

For my money, there are two must have Christmas albums -- Neil Diamond's and Barbra Streisand's.

Isn't Neil Diamond's the one where he does that insane "Hava Nagila?"

[jough]

I already have a lot of stuff on it that I could probably cull out if I needed the space, but with plenty of free space there's no reason not to have both of Neil Diamond's Christmas albums at the ready.

Are BOTH really necessary?

For my money, there are two must have Christmas albums -- Neil Diamond's and Barbra Streisand's.

I have Kenny G's, too.

I find that they really know how to celebrate the true spirit of Christmas.

[slink]

Jough, now you'va had a chance to spend some time with your new drive, and no doubt used it to playback music, can you tell me what the access time is like on it?
And I'm guessing it's USB2 or FireWire, yes?

I am seriously considering a large (200gb) external drive now to archive my music which is getting... silly.
I want the option of portability for gigs, and thus an external I could hook up to the laptop would sort the 30gb limit easily. My worry is that dragging mp3's from all over the drive into the players, sometimes 10 or 15 tracks will get plaid for about two seconds while searching. I am concerned that an external drive will not be able to keep up with these kinds of demands however, as no external storage method has been able to yet, and though I am impressed with USB2 for instance, it is the sheer size of the drive I am worried about.

So anyway, how does it look?

[jough]

I have a Maxtor One-Touch 250Gb drive (that looks very very cool - aluminum and blue LEDs) and is very fast on both USB2 and Firewire, but tends to sustain a better transfer rate on Firewire (significantly better).

I have been playing MP3s from it non-stop all night pretty much with nary a glitch.  There is no discernable difference between accessing files on it and accessing files on the internal hard drive.  

Access time is about 9.3ms.