What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a hard drive in my home digital music player?
• Hard drive storage on a digital music player eliminates the need for a PC and a network because it stores all of the digital music files inside the digital music player. There are several drawbacks to this. For example, hard drives are always dropping in price for greater capacity, but are difficult to swap on most digital music players so you’ll be buying “last generation” storage at a premium price. Also, it’s difficult if not impossible to back up the digital music player hard drive and if it crashes without a back up you’ll lose all of your songs! Lastly, many digital players with hard drives do not allow other players in the home to share the same music library. So you end up with a very big jukebox in the living room that is inaccessible to anyone else. • In contrast, with all of your music on a PC hard drive, you can upgrade the drive easily and inexpensively as you need more storage, you network the music to multiple points in the home, and you can back up the drive with comm
