Musicm8 NAS - External hard drive - help!

[admin_exported]

Hi

Can anyone help. I have just bought a Musicm8 to link up to my Sonos which is fantastic. I now want to add an external backup drive. The drive has to be formatted to FAT32, and 1 terrabyte in size.

Can anyone recommend a good value drive.

Thanks

 

[The_Lhc]

Honestly, I wouldn't have thought it would make any difference what the drive is. As for the formatting plug it into your PC and format on there first.

 

[Anonymous]

I remember reading a wise post that ran "There are two kinds of hard drives. Those that have failed, and those that will fail." So whatever you buy, don't automatically look for the cheapest. Look for something with good fan cooling, yet which also runs quietly, so you can leave it on all the time - turning on and off is probably the single biggest cause of mechanical stress (and failure) in an external drive. I use an Iomega Ultramax myself, for what it's worth.

And even once you've backed up your music from musicM8 to a drive, make some more backups to DVD. Redundancy might be a dirty word in today's economy, but with computers, it's a golden rule.

 

[PJPro]

Andy Kerr:...
And even once you've backed up your music from musicM8 to a drive, make some more backups to DVD.

Better to have multiple external drives and store them in difference places, eg the garage, work, etc.

 

[Anonymous]

Andy Kerr:
I use an Iomega Ultramax myself, for what it's worth.

Thanks for the advice. Which Iomega Ultramax do you have?

 

[Anonymous]

The 1TB version (it looks like a miniature Mac G5). Costs about £110 on Play. And what PJPro said is perfectly correct, in the ideal world you have multiple hard-disk copies of your hard disks, although that can get costly, which is why I mentioned DVDs as a 'better than nothing' alternative.