external hardisk & external bluray drive (mac) recommendations?

[Guest asylum]

thinking of setting up a computer audio system using Mac Mini..

 

looking for a external bluray cd drive to rip all my blurays/DVDs & CDs into the mac mini. any idea which external bluray drive is good/reliable and readily available at local stores?

 

will be storing all the movies and songs in a external hard disk instead of storing in the internal 500GB in the Mac Mini. looking at 1TB onwards. which hard disk brand is better? wouldn't want it to crash easily..

 

 

 

 

[wizardofoz]

Look for a bluray external with 5-1/4 format full size ie not a slim portable drive if you want it robust for lots of ripping. Might have to find your case in get a bare drive.

 

If you want crash proof look for those external raid 5 types or nas like setups tho not cheap your time is money also. Try memory world at funan or sls, but stay away from drobo - read the horrors online

 

Online you can source from www.Macsales.com Lots of options

 

Ripping Br on the Mac is not mainstream so be prepared to put some trial and error effort in. Trol the online forums for more

 

[Guest asylum]

thanks for the info..

 

how do those RAID 5 work? do they work just like normal external hard disk? are they significantly more reliable? faster also?

 

is Macsales reliable place to buy from? the RAM they are selling is cheaper than Apple and according to Apple website, it says it is easy to add on RAM on the Mac Mini 2011.

 

based on what i googled... people use makeMKV to rip the blurays then use softwares like PLEX and VLC to watch on MAC OS.