Update: I’m beginning to think that I made a mistake with these LaCie purchases.
LaCie Big Disk
Well I added a terabyte more of storage today in the form of two LaCie 500 Gig Big Disks. Call it an impulse buy. They were selling for under $1 per gig — $449 each at CompUSA. Why did I need an extra terabyte? Well to start, I finally decided after going without MCE television for a few months (and utilizing my phenomenal HDTV TiVo as its replacement) to hook it back up. DirecTV came by and installed a second receiver in my living room.
Now one receiver is the HDTV DirecTV TiVo and the other is a non HDTV DirecTV receiver to be used with MCE. So one of the LaCie drives will be hooked up to this machine for recording television. What do I plan on recording on MCE? Well a few things.
First I’m going to record childrens programming to make DVDs for the kids to play at home and in the car. I’m tired of buying DVDs for them to just scratch or wreck. So I’ll record all their favorite shows and movies and we can play them back for them in the car. Since you can’t burn to DVD with the TiVo I haven’t been able to do this.
Second, I’m going to record music — not music as in from those crappy music channels on DirecTV but special live recordings to convert to .mp3. One of the things I missed about not having the portability of my content with my HDTV TiVo was that I couldn’t make my .mp3s.
There is so much great live music on television these days: Austin City Limits, Saturday Night Live, Sessions at West 54th, Special HBO concerts, Conan, Leno, Letterman, Kilborn, et al. And the list goes on. Check out Rock on TV sometime for a real treat of all of the great music on television.
Now I can record my favorite musical performances, use Total Recorder to create a .wav file and then use Cool Edit to convert the .wav to an .mp3. Wah la. Instant live bootleg recording.
So basically I’ll have a half terabyte full of kids shows and music. Well and I’ll also record the occasional movie to transfer to my laptop for remote viewing.
The 2nd drive. Well let’s just say that sometimes I get thirsty for more music and you never know when you might need another half terabyte or so.
I’m hoping these LaCie drives hold out ok. I haven’t read or heard much about them. I’ve had a couple of Maxtors fail in the past. I’ve also got a Cobra drive which has held up well thus far. We will see.