CDRLabs.com

Ok, here's the deal. I'm going to rip all of my audio cd's (about 325) and store them on harddrives and play them over the network on my xbox. As of now I have 2 computers. One has a 120 gig 2 meg cache WD, and the other box has a 30 gig Maxtor, and 2 80 gig Maxtor's, one 2meg and one 8meg. I am going to buy another 120 gig WD from Newegg, but am unsure whether to buy the 8 or 2 meg version, simply because I want to put the 2 wd's in a raid array, but am unsure of if the difference in cache is going to be a big deal or not. I'd rather buy the 8 meg, just because at newegg it's not more than a $10 difference, plus getting the 3 year warranty. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Drives with 8MB cache are typically faster.

However, if you have 2 different drives in RAID 0, you're going to be limited by the slowest drive. So unless you have 2 120GB WD Special Editions with 8MB, might as well buy the regular 2MB Caviar.


www.storagereview.com

Click on the database button.

Check the drives you want to compare.

Should be all the info you need.

The WD's 8MB cache is not optimized for RAID 0 and is thus basically useless over the 2MB cache when used in a RAID 0 array.

I assume you're planning to use RAID 0?

um.. I assume you do realize that 325 70 minute CDs would only take up about 30GB of space if compressed to VBR192 LAME MP3s.

And also the read spead of any modern IDE drive is going to be about 3 or more times the speed of 100BaseTX ethernet... leaving me wondering why you want RAID at all?

Does the X-Box require some special audio format that sucks? why oh why?

After having converted some cd's, I realised my math was bad on how much hd space I would need for the cd's. The raid was so I'd have enough room, not for speed or anything like that. Now I can just use an 80 gig and combine all my mp3's. Thanks for the replies.

For 128Kbit/sec mp3 assume about 1MB per minute of audio... for VBR 192Kbit/s mp3 assume about 1.5MB per minute of audio