External USB or Network Drive

[berrywell]

Hi all,

I have been using an ageing PC to run and play around with e-touch.
Unfortunately that finally gave up the ghost last Thursday evening, so I've purchased myself an all-in-one touch-screen PC to finally make use of the touch facilities, the problem is that the new PC only has a 1 TB internal hard drive.

I was just wondering which system to use, an external USB drive (was thinking of a 5TB version) or a network drive connected to the router.

Does anyone use either of these systems to store their collections or do you all just use internal drives and what's problems have you encountered using the external/network options?

[Mark Norville]

Personally I am all internal running on two PC's but what I will say is that think about the cost of both and the accessibility of them and also placement. I personally would probably just build another PC as you can build one cheaper than a NAS and then use that as a server but either way you have to think about power consumption as well.

The money you have spent already I personally would have preferred a cabinet with a touch screen and also a computer inside running the lot. You have got me thinking now actually as my neighbour has got a touch PC from HP and it is akward as hell for connections and adding anything to it, this will be your main concern.

Hopefully you have not lost anything valuable from your old drive.

Regards

Mark

[Barcrest]

I have mine on an 8tb external and I still have my old 3tb and 2 1.5tb's with the older versions of my collection on. I am planning on getting a second 8tb to have it mirrored.

[berrywell]

hey guys,

Thank you for your replies. I will probably go with the external USB drive and buy the biggest one I can afford. It will have to wait till after Christmas now though as I have more pressing things to use my money for.

Personally I am all internal running on two PC's but what I will say is that think about the cost of both and the accessibility of them and also placement. I personally would probably just build another PC as you can build one cheaper than a NAS and then use that as a server but either way you have to think about power consumption as well.

The money you have spent already I personally would have preferred a cabinet with a touch screen and also a computer inside running the lot. You have got me thinking now actually as my neighbour has got a touch PC from HP and it is akward as hell for connections and adding anything to it, this will be your main concern.

Hopefully you have not lost anything valuable from your old drive.

Regards

Mark

The PC that died was a very old one that I use to use for experimental purposes before putting things on my main PC.

I went for an all-in-one PC for cost & convenience reasons, I was fortunate as when I was looking I found an Amazon Black Friday Weekly deal at just £299, so purchased it, as it's only a second computer for running just the jukebox and experimental stuff, I wasn't too concerned about the low price and so far it seems very good.

I currently don't have the time to build a dedicated Jukebox machine. Also, I personally find the connections on the new all-in-one pc no worse to access, if not easier, than trying to clamber around the back of my main desktop base unit. Everyone to their own but don't get me wrong, if I had the time and money, I would have purchased an old Sound Leisure touch jukebox from e-Bay and built it that way.

Thankfully, I'd had everything backed up onto external hard drives, I was caught out once with losing everything on my PC many years ago, once bitten, twice shy as the saying goes.

Now I just need to get installing the Jukebox software and finally using it as it should be, with a touch screen. 

Regards

Tel.

[Mark Norville]

You got a bargain there then if you got it for £299 I think my neighbour said he paid near enough 2 grand for his. You are lucky if you can pick up a touch screen monitor for that nowadays, no one wants them any more and the price has shot up, I think I paid £150 for mine a few years back an Packard bell viseo 20t I thought that was expensive back then, but compared to these ELO screens that was a bargain.

Regards

Mark

[Barcrest]

Just looked on ebay and the smaller wall mounted sound leisure boxes are going for £225 which is a bargain. I do like those sound post boxes.

[berrywell]

Just looked on ebay and the smaller wall mounted sound leisure boxes are going for £225 which is a bargain. I do like those sound post boxes.

This is something I would have loved to have purchased. I was very tempted last week after my old PC went up in a puff of smoke. What put me off was the worry of finding all the necessary screen drivers to work with either windows 8.1 or 10. I believe these systems work on very old PC's using windows xp.

You got a bargain there then if you got it for £299 I think my neighbour said he paid near enough 2 grand for his. You are lucky if you can pick up a touch screen monitor for that nowadays, no one wants them any more and the price has shot up, I think I paid £150 for mine a few years back an Packard bell viseo 20t I thought that was expensive back then, but compared to these ELO screens that was a bargain.

Regards

Mark

Yeah, so long as it keeps working fine, I feel like I've bagged a bargain, fingers crossed it doesn't go pear shaped on me.
I did try and get a touch screen monitor back in the summertime but was put off by the high purchase prices for a decent size. The ones I found were in the £300 - £500 bracket.

[Mark Norville]

I personally would have said to stick to windows 7 if it is a dedicated jukebox I certainly will not be upgrading mine mainly because of drivers but also the fact that microgreed are supposed to be stopping a lot of things that you can download. Windows 7 still has 4/5 years of updates left so that is good for me, with an I5 and 8 gigs of ram it will last a lot longer than that.

I have a dongle through the back of the jukebox to the top so when the time comes it can be removed from the internet and just used for storage, like you I am one hard drive down at the moment which has pee'd me off as I had a lot of tv shows on that and that was the newest drive as well and was about a 3rd full. I am still hoping that I might be able to pull stuff across so will keep trying until I get fed up and decide to throw it in the bin as Seagates terms and conditions are stupid, I am glad that I actually read them.

Use static bag, use two inch foam rubber, use the same box or almost as you had it and don't use bubble wrap otherwise your warranty is void. If I hadn't of read that, I would have sent it back in bubble wrap and a static bag wasted money on postage to be told sod off.

Thank god for Dabs and their returns policy though

I shan't say no more than that lol

[berrywell]

I haven't used a Seagate hard drive for years now. I don't know why but they always seemed unreliable to me, unsure if I was just unlucky with them or not.

As for windows 7, I don't have any spare copies of the retail version lying around and I cannot seem to find anyone selling them any more (for a reasonable price at least). I do have an .iso Win 7 on a DVD but I don't know if Microsoft allow you to still purchase a Product Key from within the software, they officially stopped selling the product a while back now. Hence why I've moved to windows 8.1 and 10 for the time being. My main PC still has trusty windows 7 on it.

[Mark Norville]

Obviously cannot say too much but always plenty of versions around on the tinternet. I use Tor Browser to get around the websites that have been switched off, so easy to download and then activate.

I have a purchase version and for some reason I have been able to install Windows 7 on two machines using the same key and yet before it would have come up with a warning saying this key has been used before.

I seriously would consider going that route as if you are on a 1 tb hard drive then near enough a quarter would be for factory restore. I brought a PC like that ages ago and took it back to pc world and got my money back, I said to them if the hard drive buggers up then I am down a computer and a operating system I honestly wouldn't never trust pre configured drives.

Regards

Mark

[Barcrest]

I would never use anything other than an SSD for my boot drive now. The improved boot times and general load times of the whole system are great. You can get them at a pretty decent price now if you are only having the O/S and a few apps on there you don't need anything huge.

[yakman4]

Just upgraded my Motherboard Processor and boot drive to a 120gig ssd for less than $100  running windows 7 32bit boot time is about 15 seconds.
Well worth the upgrade Music is still on the 1TB drive.

[Barcrest]

Just upgraded my Motherboard Processor and boot drive to a 120gig ssd for less than $100  running windows 7 32bit boot time is about 15 seconds.
Well worth the upgrade Music is still on the 1TB drive.

This is what i have set up too. Yakman you might want to try the V9 demo (Install to a different folder) as that is faster, try it and see what you think.

[yakman4]

This is what i have set up too. Yakman you might want to try the V9 demo (Install to a different folder) as that is faster, try it and see what you think.
[/quote]

How much for me to upgrade to lifetime membership.

[berrywell]

Sorry to revive a bit of an old thread but thought I'd give an update to my Juke project.

Well, I'm my opening post, I said I had purchased myself a brand new all-in-one touch-screen PC, well I can report that at the beginning of last week, it went wrong!

Basically, two things went wrong, the DVD/CD drive stopped reading discs and the USB connections started working erratically (usb would acknowledge the external HD sometimes and other times it wouldn't - plus wouldn't read any other USB device.)  So this has now been returned back to shop and a refund given.

Anyway, lesson learnt - Never Again - will I purchase an all-in-one solution, so I'm going to go back to the drawing board and now have to decide whether to purchase & modify a Sound Leisure Juke from e-bay or just build a new PC with a touch-screen monitor.

Either way, my jukebox project is currently on hold for the foreseeable future.