Advice requested: Internal or external harddisk?

[RonnnL]

Yesterday, I got an old HP desktop working as a vortexbox-server. I will dedicate this server to my music collection (if I get wake-on-lan working...)


The internal harddisk is not large enough, however. I am in doubt whether I should buy a larger internal disk (IDE probably) or use an external harddisk to connect through USB.


Currently, I have my music (both downloaded MP3 and ripped FLACs) stored on my regular (winxp) desktop PC and also on an external 500GB USB Western Digital harddisk, NTFS formatted, connected to my squeezebox touch.


My idea is the following:

• I format the existing external harddisk, and mount it in Vortexbox according to the instructions on the website.
• Once I have the server up and running, I transfer my music from the desktop PC to the Vortexbox, and thus store it (again) on the external harddisk.
• Regularly, I can make back-ups by simply connecting with my desktop PC and copying newly ripped music from my vortexbox to my desktop PC.

This would allow re-installing from an ISO when needed, without losing my data. And I would save the € 50,- for a new internal disk...


Is this the best option? Or are there drawbacks to this method. (Note that I'm a newbie to Linux, so I need the option with the least amount of tweaking/tuning required...)

[Ron Olsen]

Having your music library on an external hard drive will work.


As you mentioned, the upside is being able to do a clean install of VortexBox from the iso without affecting your music library.


The downside is that the performance of SqueezeBox Server won't be as good as with an internal drive.


I would go ahead with the external drive approach. Many people do this. See if the performance of SBS in doing a complete rescan of your library is acceptable. See if the browsing performance of SBS (from its webpage or from another control device) is acceptable.


Your external drive is already formatted as NTFS; there should be no need to reformat it.

[RonnnL]

Thanks for all the info. Great support on this forum! And good to hear that NTFS is the main format to use. Makes things a lot easier!


Should the following plan work? I'm needing some confirmation here since I want to prevent accidentally deleting content on the drive:


1) Create new directories on my external disk:


/music/flac


/music/flac/mp3-copy


/music/mp3


/movies


/pictures (etc.)


2) Copy the existing mp3-collection (and possibly existing flac's i don't want to be duplicated to mp3 by vortexbox) to /music/flac/mp3-copy, thus preventing doubles on the squeezebox.


3) attach usb-drive


4) run fdisk -l to see the location of the drive


5) mount the drive using e.g. : mount /dev/sdb1 /storage


6) Reboot, rescan, enjoy

[Ron Olsen]

RonnnL said:

Thanks for all the info. Great support on this forum! And good to hear that NTFS is the main format to use. Makes things a lot easier!


Should the following plan work? I'm needing some confirmation here since I want to prevent accidentally deleting content on the drive:


1) Create new directories on my external disk:


/music/flac


/music/flac/mp3-copy


/music/mp3


/movies


/pictures (etc.)



This looks correct.



2) Copy the existing mp3-collection (and possibly existing flac's i don't want to be duplicated to mp3 by vortexbox) to /music/flac/mp3-copy, thus preventing doubles on the squeezebox.



I don't think you'll be able to have some FLACs not be mirrored to mp3 by placing them in the mp3-copy directory. The flac2mp3.pl script that does the mirroring looks under /storage/music/flac recursively for all files with a .flac suffix, regardless of the name of the subdirectory.



3) attach usb-drive


4) run fdisk -l to see the location of the drive


5) mount the drive using e.g. : mount /dev/sdb1 /storage


6) Reboot, rescan, enjoy



This all looks good.


You will also want to add a line to /etc/fstab to have the drive automounted at boot time:

/dev/sdb1 /storage ntfs auto,noatime,user 0 0

If you want the proper drive to be automounted regardless of the device name, enter the command

blkid /dev/sdb1

On my VortexBox, this returns

/dev/sdb1: UUID="725A66165AF23401" TYPE="ntfs"

You can then change the line in /etc/fstab to

UUID="725A66165AF23401" /storage ntfs auto,noatime,user 0 0

Use the UUID returned by the blkid command on your system.

[RonnnL]

I don't think you'll be able to have some FLACs not be mirrored to mp3 by placing them in the mp3-copy directory.



I don't have the server up and running right now, but i'm sure that I can simply disable the mirroring function. And otherwise, it won't hurt to have the mp3-versions available.



You will also want to add a line to /etc/fstab



I'm off to find a tutorial on editing files in linux…


edit: done, found out that 'nano' is installed. Things are working perfectly now! Thanks!