I'm not sure if this is common knowledge or not, but a good thing to consider if you're thinking about storing several hundred albums worth of music is a RAID array.

RAID as defined by webopedia

(rād) Short for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, a category of disk drives that employ two or more drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance. RAID disk drives are used frequently on servers but aren't generally necessary for personal computers.

Basically you use more than one drive to get more performance or data security. Many of today's motherboards support this technology, but a RAID add on card (controller) can be bought for less than $100.

RAID requires equally sized hard drives (preferrably the same model). Actually it's not required, but the array is based on the smallest size drive in the array.

The obvious disadvantage to RAID is that you generally have to buy multiple drives to get the same amount of storage. The advantage (depending on the mode used) is greater performance or more importantly in this case is data protection if a hard drive fails.

The basic RAID modes that would be ideal for music storage would be

RAID 1 (mirroring) - This mode uses two drives. One is simply a mirror of the other. The amount of storage in the array is equal to that of the smallest drive, there is no performance gain or hit. If one drive fails, it can be replaced while the other still holds the data.

RAID 0+1 (striping + mirroring) - This mode requires four drives, and adds a mirroring array to a two striping arrays for a slight performance increase with mirroring. Storage space is equal to 2 X the smallest drive in the array. (RAID 10 is basically the same thing as this, it adds a striping array to two mirroring arrays)

RAID 5 - (striping with fault tolerance) - This mode is similar to 0+1, but it uses three drives. Storage space is equal to 2X the smallest drive in the array.

It really isn't much harder to set up a RAID array than it is to simply install a single hard drive. There is plenty of info on the net about how exactly to do this. I would recommend RAID 1. You can use a controller card to create multiple RAID arrays.

Avoid RAID 0 (striping), which doubles your risk of HDD failure (uses two drives as one and has a 1:1 storage ratio), but adds a slight performance increase.

Just something to look into for those planning to store massive libraries!