firstly I think maxtor drives completely blow.. I had one fail just last month and it lasted ONE year with moderate use.. Id recommend seagate absolutely.. verrrrrrry quiet and a 5 year warranty, as opposed to the LOUD maxtor wich had a ONE year warranty..
I would completely go the opposite way than this post. Maxtor is damn near the only brand I would buy period. I now have 14 300GB Maxtor drives in my media server and have not had a single problem with any of them, period. The Hitachi drives suck! The last Seagate I had had a great warranty and I sure did use it. Three times to be exact until I gave up and made the switch to Maxtor full time.
Now if you just always buy the cheapest drive from the cheapest line they sell then you get what you pay for. But if you buy on their mid level lines you shouldn't have any problems with any of them.
yeah not sure whether my drive was from the "cheap" line, but it began to fail exactly one month after one year.. I have since moved to two seagate drives and they seek faster, are much less noisy, and the warrenty rocks(like I said).. hmm.. how old are these maxtor drives of yours?
Well the current 300GB drives that I use are all new within the lasy 18 months or so. They are all in the DiamondMax 10 line of drives. I am using both the SATA 150 and now the SATA 300 drives. The SATA 300's smoke the 150's btw. Alot of people usually will just buy the cheapest drive on sale at Best Buy or something but I've found that if you just search a little bit longer you can find the same price thereabouts on a drive a line or two up from the one at BB or Circuit City. I have purchased several of mine off of newegg.com from their daily deals sale.
Building a music/media server really is a lot of fun. Mine started off with an old computer running a couple of external hard drives to my current server which runs a P4 3.0ghz, 1GB of RAM and a little over 4,300 gigs of hard drive space. Currently I am adding a new HD capture card to it to use a a Tivo-like box as well.
Start off easy and build piece by piece. You can find great barebones systems all sorts of places. Newegg, Dell outlet (great suggestion pjdavep) and your local Fry's if you have one. Remember that when building a media server you don't need the power of your regular machine at all. You could most likely get away with a sub 1.2Ghz processor like a P3 or older Celeron. Where you want to put your money is in the drives. With the 300's I use selling for $85 bucks now getting quality is so much easier.
You can also find great deals on motherboard/processor combos. I've seen acceptable combos go for $75 add a $40 case, $50 of RAM and one of the 300gb $85 hard drives and you're set for less than $300 total. If you know how to use a screwdriver you have all the tools you'll need. Remember that most motherboards come with built-in LAN as well as some having 24bit audio playboack possible. Pretty good deal.
Don't be scared by building your own.
Topic: Making a music server (Read 9221 times)