I typical CD has 600MB - 700MB of music on it. Some only have 400MB-500MB but I would take a guess that they might average to 600MB. It will take 600MB times the number of disks if you store them as .WAV files. The .WAV files have no compression. If you store them as WMA lossless they take up about half the space on disk. From what I have read, most of the other lossless formats average out to about half as well.

I have 2 x 400GB external USB drives for back up. This way if one of my drives fail I do not have to rip hundreds of disks again.

I think that the Escient servers are a nice product for some people. I think they fit the bill for a new custom installed home theater/media room system. One where the installer will install it once and the home owner will never know the details and occasionally listen to music in the home. The interface is simple but with very little flexibility. Perfect for the suburban housewife.

I know that for the longest time you could only store the music tracks as MP3 with Escient systems, I think the newest models have an option to now store as .WAV files. I had a couple of IMerge sound servers; they cost more than $2,000 and worked much the same way. They are making improvements, some issues may be better now, but backing up your machine was difficult if not impossible without getting the machine to your dealer. If you want more drive space you better have lots of cash. You could not take tracks and burn a disk for your car/boat, there newest version may allow this. You could not create .MP3 for your portable music player. I like to have my music available to me so that I can do what I want with it. If you want to have your music on your portable player you will need to rip it on your computer and move it over to you player and them your server.

The problem for them is they were very simple to use but not very flexible, as time goes on they add more features like networking and they get closer to a PC in flexibility, they also get a user interface that is as complex as a PC, for me I just go the PC route.