I am going to start building an audio library of all my CDs (around 140-150 of them) and I would like to ask how others here have set up things on their systems. Things like:

1. Operating System Used
2. File System Layout (for management)
3. Backup system used (if any)
4. Codec preferred


Thank you!


Agent69:)

1. WinXP because it will stay running for days without crashing.

2. File system: Drive:Artist{year of release) AlbumArtist - Album - No - Track.mpc
Various ArtistsAlbum - No - Artist - Track.mpc

In each folder with album files I include: ~50 KB jpeg of album cover, replaygain.log, m3u.

3. 700 MB CDRs (pain in the ars*, but must be done as hard drives are no backup)

4. MPC Xtreme or Insane. The bitrate is not an issue when you can buy 120 GB drives today, and these are not the top end either. In one year 160 GB drives will be common.

I've actually been considering a USB or Firewire enclosed hard drive for backups.


Agent69:)

1. Win98, because I'm too lazy to upgrade to WinXP

2. ArtistArtist - Name.aac

3. What's that?

4. AACenc -extreme or -archive

Regards;

Me.

1. Win2k, because I'm used to windows and it's much more stable than 9x (and I don't have the money/desire to upgrade to XP...plus I think it looks ugly =P). Linux is looking much better these days though (my brother's Debian box with KDE looks quite nice), so I might try it out again soon. But the OS doesn't make a huge difference in archiving audio; most of the good solutions are cross-platform.

2. I have my stuff broken into major genre directories, then below that use a "artist - album title" directory naming format. Some people prefer to have a subdirectory for each artist and then a subdirectory below that for each album; either way is fine with me.

3. My brother shares mostly the same tastes in music as I do, so we periodically trade vast numbers of albums with each other (between my university connection and his cablemodem), resulting in the two of us having approximate mirrors of each others' archives.

4. MP3s encoded with LAME with --alt-preset standard (or fast standard). This is mostly because such MP3s are transparent to my ears (I have yet to successfully ABX a single sample at this encoding), and since I like to send songs to friends who are not technically literate enough to care about installing Winamp plugins, I stick to mp3. If I could hear better quality with another codec I'd switch despite that, but I can't, so there's no reason to switch. If Winamp gets an Ogg decoder plugin in its default install soon I'll probably switch to that, partly for the added quality (if I can get added quality free and it's just as usable as mp3, why not), and partly for the open source/patent-free nature of the project. The reason I care about default install is that I can explain to my friends "you can't play this ogg file because your version of Winamp is too old; upgrade to the latest version" and the non-tech-literate people will understand perfectly. But "you can't play this ogg file because you don't have the Ogg decoder plugin for Winamp" will result in a slew of questions about what a decoder is, what a plugin is, how to install it, etc., etc. =P

That's a reasonable idea: It's much faster than CDRs, and easily updated, but much more expensive.

Backup -

Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly,
There's not half the files there used to be,
And there's a millstone hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.

I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.
Now all my data's gone and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.

Yesterday,
Need for backup seemed so far away.
Seemed my data were all here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday.

Anonymous
(http://www.mrichter.com/cdr/yesterdy.htm)

1. I use Win2k but i think the OS is not that important.

2. i normally use "drive:Artist - AlbumTracknumber - Title"
but that isnt really nice if you have like 150 albums.
Because of that i wrote me a programm to find my music faster. its in Alpha stage, but works quite well: Her are some screenshots:
http://www.under-suspicion.de/mpc8.jpg
http://www.under-suspicion.de/mpc7.jpg
(If anybody wants a copy , please message me)

3. I burned everything on CDR'S because i dont trust any harddisks'

4. I use MPC - xtreme because it gives my ears perfect quality

1. Linux for me/Windows for the gf. The music has its own 10Gb FAT32 partition so it can be listened to on Windows and Linux.

2. Artist/Album/Artist - Tracknumber - Trackname.ogg

3. I'll backup once Ogg 1 comes out and I've reencoded everything . Just dump the files to CDRs.

4. Ogg RC3 with quality level 5

1. Win2k

2. drive:Artist - AlbumTrk. no - Trk. title - genre - release date.wav

3. original CD is the backup

4. none, .wav only

Solaris


FAT32 filesystem:

artist/album/artist_-_album_-_t#_title.mp3


Original CD


Was lame --r3mix until 3.90, now --alt-preset standard

I also use the Apache::MP3 module for Internet access and streaming of the collection.

--jth

1. Win98
2. ArtistAlbumtrk.no - Artist - Title.mp3
3. CDr
4. Lame 3.91

--
Rommel

Hehe, you could at least use lossless compression and save some space. =P

1. Operating System Used
Win XP

2. File System Layout (for management)
/Artist/Year - Album/[Artist] Track# SongTitle.mp3
- or -
/Artist/singles and remixes/[Artist] SongTitle.mp3

3. Backup system used (if any)
Sometimes CD-R, but I am re-encoding my cd collection (550 or so CD's), so no new backup yet. Eventually RAID mirrored or DVD-R.

4. Codec preferred
Originally I did Xing from AudioGrappber *gasp*. After I learned that this so horribly sux, I switched to LAME --r3mix.

1. Mac OSX
2. /iTunes Music/Artist/Album/Song.mp3
3. FUll 31gb network hard drive backup (6200 songs)
4. MP3/Lame3.91/--alt-preset standard

brett.

1. Win2k

2. drive:artisttrack# - artist - title.mp3

3. no backup, 'cause I am InSaNe! I even took a bunch of the original CDs and sold them to Cheap-o Discs for in-store credit! Talk about no backup! But now I have more CDs to encode!

4. mp3 with --alt-preset standard, since I share my shitnit with some really non-tech pals that blew a gasket just telling them they should use winamp.

I like the USB drive idea for backup. I may have to try that.
I did put all my mp3s on a separate 40Gb HD, but it is close to full with my collection. Gotta get a new HD one of these days.

I bought an mp3 car stereo, so now I have been burning some 700mb CD-Rs to listen to in the car. So cool to have 8 hours or so of music on one disc!

1. Operating System Used
WinME
2. File System Layout (for management)
One directory - D:Musicartist - album - # - song.ape
3. Backup system used (if any)
Original CD's
4. Codec preferred
Monkey - Extra High (Never heard an artifact yet!)

I don't get it...
If you prefer lossless, why "layer3maniac"?

My nick is over 4 years old now. I switched to AAC and MP+ in 1999 and lossless in 2000. I guess I should change it, but it's just who I am. Besides, I would lose my post totals.

I agree. That's not worth changing.

(I mean... losing your post totals )

What the hey...

1. WinXP, Linux, with a 4 GB partition for playing with other OSes.
2. [Artist][Album]## - [Title].[ext], or Various[Album]## - [Artist] - [Title].[ext] for soundtracks and the like.
3. Since my CDs are barely used, I just keep them handy.
4. Ogg Vorbis currently. -q 3.5 is acceptable for me, for now. Whenever I need lossless, I go with flac.

1. WinXP - because its stable as hell and has support for just about every codec and for ease of use.

2. C:MusicFull CDs# - A - MArtistCD name## - Artist - Song Title.mpc or C:MusicFull CDsN - ZArtistCD name## - Artist - Song Title.mpc for full cds (i find with a large collection it is essential to group them by splitting the alphabet). I use the same deal with singles except they dont have sub directoried for artists and the file names are usually just Artist - Song Name

3. For now Burning to CDs and using Meista's MPC Exploder (which also supports MP3 as long as it only has no tag or id3v1.1... no id3v2.0) or CD Indexer to make searchable lists of the files on the cds... provides for an wasy way to find a cd or song archived on a cd when you have a ton of backup cds.

4. MPC - because to me it has the best quality... i personally encode to -standard -ltq fil, because i havent heard nearly and artifacts, and the ones i did dont bother me becasue it saves space. for higher quality id probably use -extreme or -insane... also MPC is very fast to encode and uses almost no CPU power to decode. also in case i decide to switch os's there is decoder source available and already compiles decoders and plugins for linux and others os's

hope this helps out!

spase,

in case you or anyone else happened to miss it, I just wanted to link to my program of choice to keep track of thousands of songs in .mpc-format on multiple CD-R's: Mpeg Audio Collection. It's free, quite neat and supports a variety of formats, including Monkey's Audio. Loads of handy features such as statistics, reporting and searching of both filenames and id3-tags.

Check it out if you haven't.

/ Uosdwis

Am I missing something really obvious? ...

Common answers:

2. (some really really long filenames)

3. burn to CDR


When I burn to CDR, I have a 64 character limit, which would destroy the long filenames. How do you get around that (automatically), without making the CDR copies unreadable without some kind of extraction?

D.

You make sure you put enough metadata into each file, to enable you to reconstruct the filename no matter what happens to it. This is easier in some formats than in others.

1. OpenBSD
(gives me a bitrate quite similar to
Garftuned -b999)

I also have plenty of MP3s and MPCs
lying 'round. :)

1. Win2k Sp2
2. /artist/album/track# - title.aac
3. Cd-r
4. Aac

Man, i personaly believe thet EVERY M$ product ia as buggy as hell [but not everyone can see it] especialy when you try to customize it. The deeper you get with those customizations the often crashes appear. You fix one - two new are on their way...
Ok you install this very XP*******d OS for happy living thru next few years. But you're not happy with default configs, with default looking, with default behaviour etc. Maybe you should try to make some changes to suit your needs? Bad idea!
And lets not forget: the more software and drivers u install and uninstall... [know the rest]
They should write on the box: 'optimized for default user, any changes could impact your system and your emotional state'...
I think i could hang any past and coming M$ release with ease. You think i'm happy?

Sorry, i know you heard this song many times before and it's wrong place for such post but i just couldn't restrain myself :-)

1. WinXP, Win2k, Linux
2. NTFS
:tunezartistcdtitletracktitle.ext
:tunezartistcdtitle.m3u
then scan it with winamp 'album list' plugin which gives pretty nice structure as result
3. CDRs [DVDRs in near future i hope ;-)]
4. vqf 96kbps, hq [earlier], now ogg -q 5,20-7,00, mpc -xtreme or -insane, psytel -normal or -archive [depends if i extract music for collection or because i love it].

Peace.

Just for the record -- I've customized my Windows XP installation quite a bit and so far it's been incredibly stable.

What exactly is metadata?

Tags.
I.E: ID3v1,v2

1. Operating System Used
WinMe / Win2000

2. File System Layout
c:mediamusicArtist LPACArtist_Number_Year_Album_Track_Title.pac
eg Rainbow_024_1978_Long Live Rock 'n' Roll_03_L. A. Connection.pac

c:mediamusicArtist MP3Number Title.mp3 + tags
eg 024 L. A. Connection.mp3

Generally only enocde a complete collection from an artist, hence use of the Number.

3. Backup system used (if any)
LPAC CD-R with some fangled scheam to combat 64 char file name limit

4. Codec preferred
Home Use - Original CD in decent HiFi
PC Use - Whatever I felt like at the time encoded from LPAC files
On The Move Use - MP3 3.91 -F --alt-preset standard
In An Ideal World I Would Like To Use - AAC -normal

i would like to add..that it's an idea to make those mounted MP3 directories read only if possible..a separate file server could be useful for this..allowing read-only access to whatever user is reading from them...

Resons being windows viruses are pretty prevalent/easily spread etc and the last thing any one one wants after countless hours of ripping is an insidious virus munching random bits all over the place.

Add a good surge protector to the above MP3 box and your set.


just my $0.2....

1. Operating System Used
Server: Windows 2000, 30 GB (OS) & 100 GB (MP3) drives

Workstation: XP, 120 GB drive (to create/manipulate MP3s, play games, etc), Logitech Z-560 speakers!

Portable: Archos Jukebox (20 GB)


2. File System Layout
Server: NTFS (all with ID3v2 only)
_VariousAlbumTrack#- Artist- Title.mp3 (for soundtracks and compilations)
ArtistAlbumArtist- Track#- Title.mp3
ArtistArtist- Title.mp3 (for individual songs)

Portable: FAT-32
GenreArtistTitle (Artist).mp3 (when I have a lot of one artist)
GenreTitle (Artist).mp3 (when I have only a few of that artist


3. Backup system used (if any)
Backup? I don't need no steenkin' backup!
Seriously, duplicate hard drive (at friend's house, in his PC). Soon, when I finished re-doing all 10,000 with LAME, I'll backup to 100+ blank CDR-s via 24x burner


4. Codec preferred
Server:
EAC/LAME alt-preset standard
(streamed over ethernet to 2 AudioTrons, and my workstation)

Portable:
EAC/LAME alt-preset CBR 128
(Archos has random skips over 160-bit, and 128 is a good tradeoff in size/space for a portable)

1. WinXP

Two 80 gig hard drives RAID 0(they appear as one big drive to windows)

2. NTFS
C:My MusicArtistAlbumSong.mp3
otherwise C:My Music

3. No backups yet, tho i stored a backup of the mp3s i had on my laptop

4. MPC right now, maybe AAC later

Win98SE

d:mp3Artist - Album (Year)Artist - Title.mp3
d:mp3Compilation (Year)Artist - Title.mp3
Using only id3v2 tags

backup in 700 mb cd-r. (vivastar,verbatim,arita,tdk,emtec...)

Audiograbber, lame.dll (3.91), 256kbps, HQ, Stereo

1. OS:
Client at WinNT4 (trying out WinXP).
Server at Linux.
Playing with WinAMP thru samba and web interface:
http://www.phazer.dk/musicdemo/

2. File System Layout (for management)
artist/album (year)/NN track

3. Backup system used (if any)
Original CD or .ape + CDR

4. Codec preferred
Ogg around 320 kbps

1. Win2000, XP, Linux

2. One of the following:
w:/media.256/Pink Floyd/Relics/01 - Arnold Layne.mp3
w:/media.256/Various Artists/Pure Reggae/01 - Bob Marley & The Wailers - Stir It Up.mp3
On Linux, you might have problems with certain signs in the file name.


3. buy another hard drive, make an exact copy. It is cheaper, safer, and faster than CDR. I had some bad experience with firewire enclosures, where data got corrupt (no idea why, the same IDE drive works fine on the normal system IDE port).

4. Use CBR with 256. With the Lame encoder, I doubt seriously that there is a reason for somebody to use 320. If you have too much hard disk space, use a lossless compression codec.

I wrote a small Perl script to re-convert my MP3's to a smaller format, when I go on the road with the music, I will attach the file contents in this message.
If there are people interested in seeing other features to this, I would be happy to turn it into a web-based encoding tool

===============
#!perl -w
$SourceDirectory = 'w:/media.256';
$TargetDirectory = 'w:/media.130';

$Params = qq~--alt-preset 130 --add-id3v2~;

WorkDir();

sub WorkDir {
my $file;
my $DX = shift || $SourceDirectory;
my $TX = shift || $TargetDirectory;
opendir (DIR, $DX) or die "Can't open dir: '$DX'.nReason: $!";
my @ls = readdir(DIR);
closedir (DIR);
FILE: foreach $file (@ls) {
next FILE if $file eq '.' || $file eq '..';
my $Source = "$DX/$file";
my $Target = "$TX/$file";
if (-d $Source) {
if (! -e $Target) {
mkdir ($Target, 0777) or die "Could not create the target directory: $Target";
}
WorkDir($Source, $Target);
next FILE;
};
EncodeFile($Source, $Target);
die "Encode failed on: $Target" if ! -e $Target;
}
}

sub EncodeFile {
my $source = shift;
my $target = shift;
use MP3::Info;
my $tag = get_mp3tag($source) or die "No TAG info";
my @MP3Params = qw(TITLE YEAR ARTIST ALBUM GENRE TRACKNUM COMMENT);
foreach (@MP3Params) {
die if ! exists $tag->{$_};
$tag->{$_} =~ s/"/'/g;
}
$Params .= qq~ --tt "$tag->{'TITLE'}"~;
$Params .= qq~ --ty "$tag->{'YEAR'}"~;
$Params .= qq~ --ta "$tag->{'ARTIST'}"~;
$Params .= qq~ --tl "$tag->{'ALBUM'}"~;
$Params .= qq~ --tg "$tag->{'GENRE'}"~;
$Params .= qq~ --tn "$tag->{'TRACKNUM'}"~;
$Params .= qq~ --tc "$tag->{'COMMENT'}"~;
$source =~ s////g;
$target =~ s////g;
`lame $Params "$source" "$target"`;
}

Same here. I'm a reconfig junkie, none of the defaults work too well for me. Ak must be doings something horribly wrong, or just flat-out anti-MS and spouting what he's heard from others. NT4.0 Server and Workstation on all kinds of hardware have bean wonderful. 2K just made life easier, and now I'm running XP Pro on my Workstation so I can get something resembling decent performance with my Radeon 8500.

XP is actually the fastest, prettiest thing I've used, and I love the new Start menu that keeps my most recently used apps in a short list. Once I discovered that you could toggle the quicklaunch section I was completely happy. It looks more GNUish or Macish than the traditional hard-edged Windows feel.

On-Topic

Win2K server 9GB OS, 75GB on two drives using dfs mapping.

I've got 850 CD's online so genre sorting is a must, though I've done that since the beginning.
Drive Letter:GenreArtist - Album NameSong.mpc

Playlists from the original CD order are stored in:
Drive Letter:GenreArtist - Album Name.m3u

Backups will soon be done as Nightmedia suggests on two 120GB drives using a simple IDE RAID card at RAID level 1.

I use Musepack -xtreme which puts my average bitrate around 200Kbps and works better than my old Bladenc 256Kbps MP3 standard. I don't care about mobile playback and have a 30' fiber run off my PC to my Denon 3802 in the living room for playback.

G

NT 4 was a horrible OS. I still think it better than the 9x series Windows for the most part. The only thing that the 9x series had over NT 4 was that it was a bit better hardware and game compatability. Other than that the 9x series sucked. 2000 quietly and secretly stole more features from the UNIXs than NT4 had and was a step in the right direction. XP is pure, unadulterated, 100% uncut, gratuitous hype! They stole some more features form the UNIXs for XP but none of them were life changing or ground breaking in any way. If you run XP it is only prety 2000. If you payed for XP Microsoft ripped you off royally.

Just for the record.

Workstation:
Pirated XP, QNX, BeOS, and Linux

Server:
Linux
Reiser FS journalised filesystem
/music/Artist Name/Album Name/Artist - Album - Track Num - Title.OGG

The actual layout does not matter because I can symlink it however I like.

All files are q 5 and the server is connected directly to my sterio. All files may be accessed over my lan via SAMBA. And the system is controlled via VNC.

I do not wish to start a flame war over Windows, as it will leed nowhere. However, a few details:

Windows NT4 is the perfect OS for an office enviroment. With the right hardware, it runs fast and stable. It only needs two small modifications to make it run ok (disable server and fixed swap.file). It will play several 2D games better than 9X/ME (i.e. Diablo2). But it cannot play DivX movies at an acceptable quality (not with my hardware anyway). Win9X can.

Both Win2000 and XP are build on the NT system. They identify themselves as NT5.0 and NT5.5. There is IMHO a vast difference between these systems.

1. General performance: Both comes with around 30 services started. There is very little performance gain from disabling 20 of them under XP, but a huge gain under 2000 (like 40%).

2. XP has way better hardware support:
XP comes with a SB Live driver, that supports digital out. 2000 does not and you have to install LiveWare from Creative. LiveWare does not work with two CPUs (error not fixed 18 months after Win2000 was released). So basically you cannot use Win2000 with SBLive and 2 CPUs (unless you don't desire digital out).
XP plays DivX fine with a Matrox G400 graphic card. Win2000 plays just as bad as WinNT4 (on my system anyway).

3. Stability: Win2000 managed to crash 6 times in 7 days (then I killed it). XP crashed once in one week (after I killed both EAC.exe and explorer.exe).

Win2000/XP compared to NT4 (on my computer (dual P3-450 + SCSI only + MGA400): NT4 more stable and better performance for non-graphic work. NT4 can rip CDs and stream from a samba server flawlessly. XP chokes on the stream and Win2000 dies from ripping...

I was not spouting one system over the other. I was simply making a statement of fact internal to the Microsoft OSes. Windows 2000 = NT5, Windows XP = NT5.1 not 5.5. There is very little difference between 2000 and XP. It is just that since Microsoft is now pushing their office space OS on indifferent home users that a few companies are supporting it who did not support 2000. You are talking about SB cards and in your instance it could be true. But my Audigy ran very well under 2000 and XP does not do anything better. There are many pieces of hardware that had excelent drivers under 2000 that have nothing under XP. Many of my favorite programs that worked under 2000 if installed under XP will destroy the system and almost surely require a clean re-install.(See PGP) After installing PGP the system became almost completly un-usable and I was not able to do a system recovery. Damn when did that feature ever work correctly. And there is other software that does the exact same thing. XP might run a bit better on your system than 2000 but that is the exception and not the rule. XP is just a ploy by the worlds ritchest company and people for more money. What they should have given out as a free upgrade to all those running 2000 they charge out the ass for and you still do not own your copy. They do, and not only that, once you have your copy installed they effectively own that part of your PC. Read that XP license in depth and you will find plenty at fault.

When it comes to non Microsoft OS I use many of em and would not specifically recommend one over the other. It would all depend on aplication and the user involved. But the thing is that they at least are fair to their users and try to get along with everyone else unlike Microsoft.

As I said this is not some sort of an OS war thing it is a simple statement of fact. No where did I say "Windows sucks! So and so rules!". Just for the record.

The one thing MS is doing with XP, that they haven't done in the past is provide a single architecture for developers going forward. 2000 moving to XP isn't a totally necessary move. I did it because ATI's drivers under 2K perform horribly. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. I like 2K just fine and it's wonderfully stable. XP certainly doesn't add much there.

XP Home adds some wonderful features for home users, and while some apps specifically written for older architectures might not work, the stability in general is what most home users and MS bashers have been looking for. There again, it's not necessarily an "upgrade" I'd recommend as much as something to make sure you have with newer hardware, unless you're willing to live with the instability that is the 9X line.

As for the licensing, for most people getting it with a new computer it doesn't make that big a deal. They get to use it, it runs (better than any previous home software from MS), and if MS pulled something like a forced upgrade by revoking licensing down the road I don't think anybody would stand for it, least of all the courts. If MS was that stupid, I think we'd see a mass migration to LINUX or something similar. Call them anything you want, but their behavior is still limited by public reactions. The licensing scheme for XP, both OS and Office, was changed after the first released draft because of user outrage, especially from the business sector as I understand it.

I can however, certainly understand your frustration with the driver and software issues. My piecemeal upgrade cycle means that all the hardware in my PC stays about a year old or less and was fully supported by XP right out of the box, so it was headache free for me. It must be great for companies like Symantec though since most of their older software is OS specific due to the OS integration.

This all sounds more like app issues than OS issues. I use audiograbber for ripping and it has worked flawlessly with NT4, 2K and XP, as well as with 9X series OS's.

Under the NT kernel the only things that should kill the kernel iself would be poorly written drivers or poorly written apps with low-level acces to the kernel. Games given more low-level access to hardware also have the potential to lock-up an NT based system, though give any app low-level access with any OS, MS or 'NIX and you're allowing for trouble.

With good hardware and good drivers, applications dying in their own memory space is the only issue I encounter. Unlike the 9X series I don't have to reboot after an app dies to ensure stability.

Here's a tip you may not know. If explorer (the user shell, not the file browser) dies on you and doesn't resuscitate itself, you can actually hit ctrl-alt-delete open the task manager, run a new task on the file menu and type "explorer" as the app. Wallah, GUI back up, no need to reboot.

Also, for Neo Neko, as someone who paid for XP, I don't consider myself as having been ripped off. Since I'm self-employed and this is my business system, actually owning the license prevents me from being liable for the $10K fines you can be hit with per incident of software piracy in the US. No matter how you cut it or attempt to justify it, in most countries, it is theft. I personally like to sleep at night knowing that in the event of an audit I'm covered. Bragging that you run a pirated copy of XP on a public forum doesn't strike me as being the most intelligent thing you could do either. I used to pass around copies of software with my friends so I don't feel bound by it, but it's technically anyone's civic duty to report known incidents of software piracy. Hope you don't have any enemieshere, or there aren't any MS employess floating around this forum.

G

Well, i'd never start this weeping if i didn't face those crashes periodicaly.
Last one was: 'cant read (or find, or write to) hive windowssystem32sofware' after restart. HDD is almost new tho (bought some months ago).
So obviously i must be doing something wrong. Not so obvious tho what exactly.

P.S Now i feel myself such an XPerienced lamer. :flipoff: :evilgrin:

Ooooh, that one. Contact MS about it. My parents' Win2K machine started doing that and after contacting IBM and blaming things on their drive they informed me that there's a timing issue with 2K (and possibly XP) where windows will kill the power at shutdown before the drives have finished writing data. Over time this supposedly corrupts data. It's a known issue, there is a hotfix available, and it will be included in SP3 for 2K. To get things going again IBM had me low-level format the drive (it failed their test software and reported bad sectors) and then reinstall the OS. At the moment I'm not sure where the real blame lies since IBM has had some notoriously bad drive lines and failed to fess up to the issues, but I also recognize that MS doesn't write perfect code either. In my experience though, bad sectors are a physical error, and aren't caused by software, so I don't know what to really think. Maybe a little from column A and a little from column B. I never shut mine down except for maintenance, so that issue is a moot point for me anyways.

The age of the HD is no guaranteee though. Some of the models in IBM's 75GXP line had a higher than average failure rate, and many people had issues in the first two months or so. No matter how stringent their quality control, every manufacturer produces a lemon now and then. It could be that you just got a bum drive. Check your manufacturer's website for a diagnostic utility and give it a spin (pun intended). If your drive has developed a louder than normal idle noise (often a high pitched whine) or has louder or odd sounding seek chatter, things could be heading South in the drive and might not show up in a diagnostic. High pitched whines that suddenly pop-up are usually bearing problems and will be accompanied by attrocious performance as the problem grows.

G