External hard drive for storing itunes library

[BubbaVO]

The collection of CDs has been finally organized and properly stored and I realized I have about 1/10th of my collection on itunes on my wife's MacBook Pro. I'm looking for suggestions on external hard drives that I can use to store the music and play from. I'm thinking 1Terabyte should do fine.

As always, your guidance is greatly appreciated.

[mathman]

Most any external will work fine for itunes storage. The data pull for playing music or movies is not that great. I've kept mine on an external WD drive for the last many years. The only thing is some drives now have a locked in partition that holds software "provided" by the harddrive manufacturer. Generally I always repartition the drives but some WD and seagate drives now have these "utility" partitions that cannot be removed. I would avoid them. http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=240

Drives are a bit of a crapshoot. I've got Lacie drives that are still going after 10 years, but some people hate them. I have had good luck with most WD drives other than the ones with the smartshit on them. (those work fine, I just don't like not being able to format them the way I want) I move my itunes to a new drive about every 3 years or so.

[veatch]

All drive manufaturers have had their issues. The best drives out there currently are Hitachi as far as reliability.

For any data you find important, RAID protect it - i like the Buffalo drives for a cheap drive protection, and *always* have a an offsite backup.

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/desktop-hard-drives/usb-30/drivestation-duo-usb-30-hd-wlu3r1/

[singlehum]

Is it difficult to move your iTunes library after it has been established on a particular computer or drive? I've considered doing the same but from the limited reading that I have done it doesn't seem as simple as I had hoped.

[veatch]

I've done it a few times - not too hard. This is probably on the mark - Apple support is generally pretty good with this stuff:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1364

Edited for spellink

[mathman]

Really easy. Just copy the itunes folder to the external drive. Open itunes while holding down the option key and then choose the location where you copied the library. There are some preferences you will want to check. Keep itunes media organized and copy to the itunes media folder when adding to library. In the advance section of the preferences. There is a place their to change the location of the itunes media folder location, but be careful with that. You can choose the wrong folder in your moved itunes library and end up with files in weird places.

[tobereeno]

I just bit the bullet and bought a 3TB Time Capsule. It's really useful and using a Macbook Air with a small 128Gb flash drive isn't limiting anymore.

[geoff_hartwell]

I just bit the bullet and bought a 3TB Time Capsule. It's really useful and using a Macbook Air with a small 128Gb flash drive isn't limiting anymore.

Sweet!!! Can you connect with your itunes on the external hard drive wirelessly, for example from another room or the porch?

And when you connect your ipod to update, howzat?

GH