KeepVault for WHS – Win 100GB Account
For those of you keeping up with our KeepVault for Windows Home Server giveaway, today we have a 100GB account up for grabs to one lucky person. And since its a biggie we are keeping the competition open until tomorrow (30th May).
KeepVault for WHS provides provides an online backup solution for our Home Servers.
Current statistics show that one in every ten hard drives fail each year. The cost of recovering a failed hard drive can exceed $7,500, and success is never guaranteed.
To help safeguard us from all eventualities, the new version 3.0 provides the following features:
- Backup to local drive for an extra layer of protection
- Status via SMS, Email, Twitter
- Faster File Uploads (up to 30% faster than version 2)
- Schedulable backups for any time of the day
- Maximum file size 20GB
- Real Time File Monitoring
- Compression for faster uploads
- Bandwidth limiter
- 128-bit encryption for your protection
- Backup any file, not just shares
- Manage online backups
- Single-file restore
- All-file restore
- Real time status indicators
- Local Event log for easy software diagnosis
- Free Support
So to get your hands on this 100GB account we just want you to tell us approximately how many (average) mp3 songs could you fit into a 100GB account. Leave your answers in a comment below before 23:59 GMT (15:59 Pacific Time) tomorrow, Saturday 30 May 2009 – All winners will be announced and notified on Sunday 31st May 2009.
NOTE: WE have determined the approx. number of mp3 songs which could fit into 100GB and the nearest answer will win the prize.
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25600
20920
28,571
Well, since you didn’t specify what bitrate, I’ll list a couple guesses:
@128kbs ~ 23,814
@192kbs ~ 15,971
@256kbs ~ 13,474
22,000
25000
23213 assuming 128kps
29,257
I did some actual research into this when I was planning to buy a portable media player. Manufacturers are constantly touting the capacity of their respective players, but you have to read their small print to understand their assumptions. There are many variables:
1) Average song length. There is no standard for what is an “average” song. Manufacturers have used numbers from 3 minutes a song up to 5 minutes. They seem to use 4 minutes most frequently. Also, I’ve checked forums where people have checked their iTunes libraries (dividing total music length by the number of songs). The song lengths have ranged from 3.17 minutes to 8.79 minutes. Obviously libraries that have an abundance of audio books or classical music might have longer average song lengths compared to others. So again 4 minutes seems like a reasonable average.
2) Compression codec. There are numerous compression codecs from AAC (iTunes), ATRAC3 plus(Sony), MP3, Ogg and WMA(Microsoft). You only asked about MP3, so we’ll go with that.
3) Bitrate. The MPEG-1 Layer 3 (MP3) standard allows bitrates from 32 kb/s up to 320 kb/s. Obviously if you recorded everything at 32 kb/s you could fit 10 times as much. MP3 player manufacturers seem to use 128 kb/s as their benchmark, but as disk sizes go up, many people are starting to encode their music in 192 kb/s or even 256 kb/s to get higher quality.
4) Sampling frequencies for MP3 are 32, 44.1 and 48 kHz. A sample rate of 44.1 kHz is almost always used, because this is also used for CD audio.
Also not included in this discussion is the cluster size of the disk. If you had a disk that had 1K clusters, a file between 1 and 1024 bytes would fit into one 1K cluster. A file between 1025 and 2048 bytes would fit into two 1K clusters, etc. Essentially there is an average overhead for each file equivalent to half the cluster size. This doesn’t include any further overhead for the disk directory, formatting of the disk, etc.
Okay, so all of this is a prelude to saying there are many assumptions and any change in the assumptions will give us a different result, so it’s going to be impossible to match your result exactly unless we have the same assumptions.
Anyway, here are my assumptions:
1) 128 kb/s MP3 audio at 44.1 KHz
2) Average song length of 4 minutes
3) No overhead from cluster size or other factors
Conversion factors:
1) 1 Byte = 8 bits
2) 1024 B = 1 KB
3) 1024 KB = 1 MB
4) 1024 MB = 1 GB
(Note most people erroneously think the conversion factor is 1000, not 1024, but you can confirm this on Wikipedia or Google)
Let’s start with average song length.
1 song = 4 minutes = 240 seconds
240 seconds x 128 kb/s = 30,720 kb/song
30,720 x 1 Byte/8 bits = 3,840 KB/song
Now take the space capacity:
100 GB x 1024 MB/GB = 102,400 MB
102,400 MB x 1024 KB/MB = 104,857,600 KB
Finally, divide the total space by the average size of each song.
104,857,600 KB / 3,840 KB/song
= 27306 2/3 songs
Answer:
27,307 songs
I forgot to mention that the MP3 format includes ID3 tags for information on the song title, album name, artist info, song length and even album art. My assumption just used the song data without the additional tag information. If you include this information, the average song file size goes up. That would lower the number of songs that could fit into 100GB.
Based on Billy Joel’s “The Stranger” at my current MP3 settings: 51046.
Based on my current library (including album artwork, etc): 16136.
One (1) REALLY AWESOME MP3!!!!
25075
27010
28572
5982
27306
Like WHS FAN I ran through basically the same computations and came up with the same number — excluding any cover art, “thumbs.db” file or anything except the actual songs in the backup. (This also makes sense as the artwork and other files can easily be recreated.)
Based on my current collection of 5000+ songs with a mix of lengths, b8itrates and sample rates, the average song is just over 3.2 MB per song (track). I am, due to lack of knowledge of the storage technology, not factoring in any adjustment for the storage cluster size or any space for directories.
Based on this I estimate approximately 32,768 songs.
My actual storage usage is very close to proportional to this estimate!
29681
Judging from my current collection, i’d say more than i ever will, but i will say 32,000 roughly
Sorry – absolutely not possible to answer this question without an understanding of the average length of a song and the bit rate used… However, the standard most manufacturerss use is 1MB/minute of music…. so based upon that calculation: you could fit 1706 hours of music into 100GB’s.
23,437,500
23809
26,790
27,225
27999