I have a MacBook, and I really enjoy using it as it is a very nice experience.
I have a PC, and I really enjoy using it as I am a power-user and have it tailored to the way I work and I’m very comfortable in the environment.
I find myself wanting to use the Mac for more but as I’m still learning keyboard shortcuts I find myself pausing and.. well it’s still not as fluid for me as working on the PC. Part of that is the resolution of the MacBook screen which is, these days, rather low. Hence my recent ponderings about a KVM to allow me to hook up the MacBook to my LCD monitor.
Anyway, another thing that stops me switching fully to the MacBook is the pitiful hard-drive. My music collection ALONE, is larger than the drive which brings me to the topic of this blog post.
I think what I need to do is switch out all of my storage needs, files, photos, music, to an external drive. That way it doesn’t matter what machine I’m on, I can just switch the external storage drive and access whatever I need.
So I just need to figure out how to move the iTunes library files to an external drive and I’m all set, I think… Ohhh yeah, and buy a big enough hard drive (and backup).
Or maybe buy an iMac… hmmmm
Or a Mac Mini?
Or just use the adaptor that came with your MacBook (at least, I got one with my PowerBook many moons ago) and plug whatever monitor you want into it.
I rather rate the 1TB Western Digital My Book Studio Edition, which is suppoedly geared towards the Mac. Seems good – fast, quiet, reliable, and cool running enough that you don’t feel the urge to fry an egg on top of it. I’m thinking of getting another one, actually, for Time Machine purposes …
Oh, and it’s in a nice silver case. Which matches my Macbook Pro. Which is obviously important, isn’t it?
Note to self: don’t apply for a job doing geeky technical reviews.
I’ve been running all my main things of externals for about 5 years now.
I still haven’t come to the ideal solution but right now I use a mac mini as a server and a media center and my mactop pro as my primary machine for everything.
The mac mini is plugged into several external hard drives giving me about 1.5 terrabytes and I can acces that from either machine via the network.
I also suggest you look at the Drobo. My next hdd purchase will be raid. Who wants a drive failure to knock out all your music or pictures.
james – yeah I can do that, but that doesn’t help with storage..
Moving your iTunes library to an external drive is easy. All you have to do is go to the ‘Advanced’ tab under Preferences and specify a new folder location for your music (i.e. an external drive). When that’s done, click on Advanced (in the toolbar, not the previously mentioned tab) and choose ‘Consolidate library’. That should copy all your music to the new folder on the external drive.
Once you’ve done that, you’re free to delete your music from the iTunes folder on your MacBook (in my case, I just replaced it with an alias pointing to the drive I keep my music on) — but be sure not to delete the whole folder! You still need to keep the library folder and other stuff there, lest you want to lose all your song info and album artwork!
External HDD are teeny tiny these days, but yeah, a whole solution…
My 24″ iMac is fantastic 🙂
Synchronicity. Only yesterday I was scanning the PC World site for backup gadgets. Saw a 1 terabyte thing. Heavens, I can remember when Gigabyte sounded sexy.
Oh and btw, G. You might not be aware that your comment page doesn’t work on Symbian 6 Nokia. Main page fine. Comments readable, but not writeable. Just thought I’d let ye ken.
Make sure your external hard-drive has NAS capability. That was you can just plug it into your wireless router and access it anywhere on the network (wirelessly).
I hear they even have ones with bitorrent built in!
Have you done this yet Gordon? I’d really appreciate a step by step post if you do because my PowerBook has run out of space too and I’m going to have to put most of my music and photos onto an external HD.