New Hard Drive and CD ripping
The main hard drive on the workstation has been running out of space for the past few months, and the limits of semi-draconian purging has reached its limit. Basically, the storage demands from the digital camera (4-6MB files for each shot), along with the NYT Electronic Edition downloads that are piling up, pushed the volume up to the 90% full limit. Time to get more space. The Alaska trip will also be in six weeks, and we’re going to come back with hundreds of photos.
We’ve had this $40 BestBuy gift card for almost a year without quite knowing what to do with it. I had been thinking of getting an USB external harddrive with it, but kept on putting off the decision because internal drives are much cheaper, and I didn’t have a USB2.0 card in the workstation until very recently. Also, why get an ATA internal drive when I’m planning on a new computer later this year, which will have a ginormous SATA RAID-1 setup? So I’ve been scanning the BestBuy weekly ad for bargains over the past few weeks, looking for a decent-sized external that would be made more affordable by the gift card. I almost pulled the trigger a few times, but never did. This week, they had a Western Digital 120GB drive for about $50 after rebates. Combined with the low-disk-space warning from early last week, I finally moved to pick it up.
The theory now is what I should have been thinking earlier: I’ll just pick up a USB 2.0 IDE enclosure when the time comes and I’ll have the external drive in the future to hook up to the new workstation. Today, I’ll have 120GB to fill up with media files. All this space actually solves an apartment organization problem we have, in that the CD case isn’t arranged in any discernable fashion. The corollary to the notion of lots of disk space is that I’ll finally get around to ripping most of the CDs to MP3s (yes, I’m probably years behind everyone else and it’s not surprising to find me using steel and flint to make fire), thereby putting most of the CDs into shoeboxes in the closet. Things will get neat quickly. And a couple hundred CDs should compress into 20-30GB of disk space, leaving plenty of room for other media.
I’m using the open source CDEX to do the ripping and encoding. I’ve used earlier versions and it does a decent job. Interestingly, the old Ricoh DVD-ROM/CD-R I have in the main workstation (it’s a first-gen combo drive) gets wobbly with a non-trivial number of music CDs, leading to the dreaded jitter errors on the rips. CDEX somehow lost track of the 40x CD-ROM in that workstation, also. It’s fixed after a reboot, but the wonky behavior has led me to do more of this work on Grace’s old Dell (writing out to the network-mounted media drive and sharing CDDB info). Apparently, those Dell Dimension 4100s come with decent CD drives, as the jitter errors have been minimal.
I’m going to do the meagre collection of classical music CDs: we already have a fair amount of pop MP3 scavanged earlier, so the classical music pieces should balance things out a bit better.
I suppose the next step is to pick up one of those iPod things people keep talking about.