Portable Storage For Surround Files

[sjcorne]

Hey everyone,

Back home I have a NAS with most of my quad/5.1 stuff backed up as multichannel FLAC. Since I'm away most of the time now, I figured why give up surround, so I bought a cheap set of creative 5.1 speakers and backed up the whole collection to a portable 2 TB seagate HDD. When I don't have time to use the speakers I play with the files in audacity (fronts=left, rears=right) or run them through the Dolby Headphone wrapper on foobar that kinda sorta works (stereo is really the last resort if you can't tell). Needless to say it's easy to get used to walking around with almost 400 surround albums in your pocket.

Unfortunately the drive bit the dust earlier this evening and I am now left with just a few albums that were on google drive. Everything is of course safely backed up at home, but I'm wondering how I should proceed when I try this again. Definitely won't rely on a mechanical disc again. SSD? TB USB sticks? Divide it all up among a bunch of smaller USB sticks? SD cards?

I'm open to suggestions...

Does anyone else carry around their collections? Most people probably just play their discs and spin their records....but for me it will be hard not having instant access for a while.

Thanks

 

[Robert van Diggele]

JanBakker is also on the road with a small speaker set . Not sure if he has his flacs stored on a laptop or HDD.

 

[HomerJAU]

I'm looking at this too as I'm planning on buying a new car early 2018 that plays MCH FLAC via multiple USB sockets.

SSD is quite expensive. I was thinking of 256GB USB keys. Sandisk make very small drives only 10mm or so (extension out the USB socket when plugged in). They are also very fast USB 3.0 so faster copying media onto the drives. Maybe get around 80 or so MCH Albums on 256GB key.

No doubt a USB (mechanical) disc drive is best bang for buck and I'd use one if I was on the road with a laptop, but I've had a couple break-ins in my current car (after leaving it unlocked!) and a 2.5" drive is an easy target. I'm thinking very small USB keys may go unnoticed...

BTW: I now play MCH in my current car via DTS DVDs I make and I have 20 or so in my glove box at any one time. They have never been touched during break-ins. Seems no one wants discs anymore! (What a pain changing discs compared to 300 odd albums all online on USB with 4 USB sockets. So can't wait to get a MCH FLAC vehicle!!)

 

[JanBakker]

JanBakker is also on the road with a small speaker set . Not sure if he has his flacs stored on a laptop or HDD.

I have everything stored on 2 hdd's one I take with me and the other one at home as back-up.

 

[salsdali]

My car plays files from a USB port so I use a usb 3.0 adapter (on amazon for 10 bucks https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B011M8YACM ) and a 250 GB SSD I got on sale for less than $100.

Trick is my car only sees drives formatted as FAT 32 and I have to use a program called "Drivesort" to arrange the files correctly.

The beauty is SSD's are virtually impervious to mechanical vibration like spinning HDD's are so it's perfect for my car because I can drive on a bumpy road and my SSD works perfectly.

SSD's are small, light and produce less heat compared to HDD's. Definitely the wave of the future.

 

[Snood]

Snood has redundancy x 3 - 3 different externals back up to :yikes

 

[J. PUPSTER]

More SSD storage in new rugged external SAMSUNG 4TB model-

https://www.cultofmac.com/804467/rugged-samsung-t7-shield-ssd-expands-to-4tb-of-storage/amp/