Large Music Collection Solution?

[Rauly632]

Hi All. I'll just get right into it. I DJ and I am enrolled in a few music promo sites where they send me music weekly. Over time my database has grown to about 2.7 TB. On black friday I purchased 2 Western Digital Green drives (2TB) to try an consolidate my music as I currently have my music over 4 HD's. I have an SSD as my main drive and use Media Monkey to manage my music.

I understand the Green drive runs about 5400-5900 RPM. Can anyone tell me if these speeds are good for my needs? Or should I be looking at the blue or black drives with 7200 RPM? Im debating on whether I should return the drives and spend the extra money.

I'm not looking to buy SSD's as this isn't a cost effective option at this time. Keep in mind I paid $58 dollars for each Green drive. Also, Ill be backing up these two drives with externals.

Thanks for your help!

 

[eton975]

For music? Yeah they'll be fine unless you're talking streaming dozens of WAVs at once.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

My only big suggestion is that you buy a 3 or 4TB drive as a backup target for everything. I've lost more date more times than I can count. putting everything on one drive that you only use for backup will save you a lot of heartache.

 

[Rauly632]

For music? Yeah they'll be fine unless you're talking streaming dozens of WAVs at once.

Yeah for music. Im not really streaming,more like searching in media monkey, listening, then copying so that I can transfer to my macbook, where I keep my dj software. I do this pretty often when preparing playlists and/or updating my music in my Macbook. I was just worried about lag time when searching my HUGE library. So the green should be no problem with this?

 

[Rauly632]

My only big suggestion is that you buy a 3 or 4TB drive as a backup target for everything. I've lost more date more times than I can count. putting everything on one drive that you only use for backup will save you a lot of heartache.

Im planning to use 2-2TB as my back-up only drives. I bought these less than a year ago. Thanks for the siggestion.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Yeah for music. Im not really streaming,more like searching in media monkey, listening, then copying so that I can transfer to my macbook, where I keep my dj software. I do this pretty often when preparing playlists and/or updating my music in my Macbook. I was just worried about lag time when searching my HUGE library. So the green should be no problem with this?

The Greens are the slowest drives available today. But that doesn't mean they're slow. They should be plenty capable for this.

Most applications don't search the drive directly, they search a smallish index which is (mostly) loaded up into memory and can be accessed much faster than actually crawling the drive's directory tree. The index is generated and updated continuously in the background and/or while the computer is idle.

Most jukebox / playlist programs (like iTunes, but I'm sure you have something better suited to DJing than that) maintain their own database for this as well. (iTunes uses a bunch of XML files for its DB. Or at least it used to.)

Where the database or index is stored, how it's accessed, how much information is in it, and whether it fits in RAM or not, generally determine how fast your searches go.

 

[Coup27]

I was just worried about lag time when searching my HUGE library. So the green should be no problem with this?

I have a Green 3TB WD30EZRX which I use as my main storage drive. I've used 718GB so far and I just ran a search in the root directory for an artist name and it took 17 seconds to search the whole drive and bring up all the tracks from that artist.

On the whole it's a nice drive. It's quiet which is important although it dpes make a soft thumping sound under heavy reading/writing. It also adds about 10 seconds to my boot up time from cold. Don't know why as my system is much quicker rebooting or booting from cold without the HDD connected - it just seems to take it's time doing its first initialising. I don't get any issues with performance.

 

[Rauly632]

I guess thats pretty good. Haha. Thanks for all the feedback fellas. I appreciate it.

 

[Rauly632]

The Greens are the slowest drives available today. But that doesn't mean they're slow. They should be plenty capable for this.

Most applications don't search the drive directly, they search a smallish index which is (mostly) loaded up into memory and can be accessed much faster than actually crawling the drive's directory tree. The index is generated and updated continuously in the background and/or while the computer is idle.

Most jukebox / playlist programs (like iTunes, but I'm sure you have something better suited to DJing than that) maintain their own database for this as well. (iTunes uses a bunch of XML files for its DB. Or at least it used to.)

Where the database or index is stored, how it's accessed, how much information is in it, and whether it fits in RAM or not, generally determine how fast your searches go.

Thanks for the reply. I think Im going to keep the greens.