Hard drive capacity

[Richard Beamer]

I recently purchased the smallest (240Gb) B2. When I then discovered just how many CDs I had in various boxes and cupboards, I thought I had made the wrong decision! However, I have ripped more than 5,000 tracks from over 400 CDs (rock/pop), all in FLAC quality, and apparently have only used 120Gb. Is this normal? What am I doing right? My experience would suggest that the marketing is very pessimistic about the capacity of the machines (or is a cynical ploy to encourage people to buy the more expensive versions!)

[Florencio Sud]

Hi...similar to me..I bought a 500Gb version to transfer all my CDs...AND my late Mother's classical CDs, AND...all my mp3's on my Synology NAS collected over 15+ years.

I "blindly" then bought a 2TB drive - (before I'd transferred anything) - and I'm halfway through (7 days and evenings ripping CDs to Flac level 5...not started on the mp3's yet), and I have GIGABYTES of free storage. I reckon 2TB drive would possibly house all of the BBC's library (well...maybe not quite),

So I think you are OK rwbe....think of all your space for expansion !!!!

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

We have an "expert" on this forum, a member called Peter, who has a magic spreadsheet he developed to analyse and predict disk space needs.

I am sure if he picks up on this thread he will give you a precise answer, so if you give him exact numbers of CDs and the compression you are using he will give you "space" (HDD needs) and "time" (how long it will take to rip and compress) - the fabric of B2 space 😂

Fred.

[Daniel Taylor]

If you ever do run out of disk space, the hard disk is easy to swap out.  I bought the B2 with the lesser capacity drive and swapped it with a 2TB drive.  I still have plenty of space.  But if I ever do get all my CDs copied to it, it will be full.

[MJB]

Hi rw

Martin Brennan here. I strive for accuracy when I present the numbers but at the same time I want the numbers to be quick to understand and compare.

Its not hard to calculate the capacity of a hard disk in seconds.

For WAV (no compression) its 176,400 bytes per second

For FLAC its about 66% of that 116,000 bytes per second

For 128k MP3 its 16,000 bytes per second

For 256k MP3 its 32,000 bytes per second

You have to allow a bit of overhead

Those numbers are not so helpful so I generally talk in terms of albums (or CDs). But CDs vary in length and because of Advertising Standards if I say it can hold 100 CDs then it must be able to hold 100 of the longest CDs you can get.

But because most CDs will be somewhat shorter than the maximum you are right - the published figures are pessimistic - by law. 

Hope that helps

Martin

On Friday, 26 November 2021 at 09:44:56 UTC rwbe...@gmail.com wrote:

[paulad...@gmail.com]

I have the same 240Gb model and have successfully ripped just short of 800 albums (10,369 tracks) to FLAC compression. Like you, I was pleasantly surprised to realise I could rip more of my collection than I imagined. 

I had a scare a lot earlier when I thought I had run out of space, but I hadn't been giving the machine time to compress from WAV to FLAC, so I gave it 3 days and it finally caught up, liberating a good 100Gb. 

It won't actually give you 240Gb - mine started to reject discs at around 229Gb. Is there any way to free up that last 10Gb?

[Peter Lowham]

Hi rwbe,

I run a 'Brennan Estimator' spreadsheet which gives various estimates of disk space used based on numbers of CDs etc. and for your collection of 400 CDs/ 5000 tracks, the disk used figure of 120GB is spot on, so you are good to keep going on as you are.

@ paulad... ; Here on the forum we recommend that you rip CD's in batches of no more than 30 and let the batch compress overnight.  That way ensures that you don't have a large backlog of wav files building up.   This prevents occasional corruption from occurring if the B2 crashes because it has run out of disk space.

Regards,

Peter.