One of my New Year's Resolutions is to go as digital as I can -- this means moving my music, movies, books and photos into the computer. In preparation for this, I built myself a four-terabyte drive RAID in a big yellow full-sized tower that has been since dubbed "Moonpie."

Currently I am copying all my mp3s up to Moonpie, one CD at a time. Each CD can take up to five minutes and I have 500+ CDs of music archived, so it's going to take a few weeks. If you're thinking, "there's no way anyone could listen to that much music," you're probably right. Still, I like having it, and it will be nice to have it all available to me instantly without going and rummaging through CD binders. When I am through I will box up all my physical music CDs (around 1,200 or so) and either put them away or get rid of them (har, har).

If you're thinking all of this sounds familiar, you're right. Earlier this year I spent about month essentially doing the same thing, copying all my mp3s to a single USB terabyte drive. Unfortunately either the drive itself was bad, the connection was too slow, or something else on my network was corrupting the files. All of those variables have been removed from the picture with Moonpie; between its fast SATA 2.0 connectivity, RAID drive redundancy and my new backup scheme, corrupting and losing files should be a thing of the past for me (ha, look at me, tempting fate). I also have a hunch part of my problem was storing all of my albums within a single directory; I have corrected that problem this go-around by splitting them up into groups by letter (A-E, F-J, etc.)

As of this morning I have moved over 180 CDs worth of mp3s. Here are a few numbers for you stat junkies:

- 26,250 files, 1,780 folders.

- 103 GB.

- 4 corrupted albums.

- 34 artists start with a number.

- Smallest directory: "U-Z" (123 albums, 9.5 GB)

- Largest directory: "P-T" (394 albums, 26 GB)

- Orphan (Singles) directory: 2,233 files, 8.5 GB.

Making a few assumptions, by the time I'm done I expect to have 482 GB of mp3 files. That's 482,000 meg. Divide that by an average of 3 meg per song and that gives me 160,666.666 (Rock!) songs. Using another average of 4 minutes per song, that's 642,664 minutes|10,711 hours|446 days worth of music. This is a low estimate, as I have another 600-800 CDs that I need to rip. (Some percentage of those are no doubt duplicates, thus the large gap in the number.)

If someone will remind me in a month or so, I will compare the final numbers to my predictions.