Need Help Storing Files on an External Drive, Apple Computer

I have a Macbook laptop that is very low on hard drive space. Im gonna need more space and was wondering how I would go about storing my music and pictures on an external hard drive yet using those photos and music as I normally would when they were on the internal drive. Id like to be able to open iTunes and play my music, I’d like to browse all my photos, and sync my iPod and iPhone weekly while being able to choose from all the pictures and music that I’d like to sync. Is there a way?
A friend told me I could move all the music onto the hardrive and then drag and drop the files onto my iPod when needed, but it seems tedious.

I just want the iTunes and iPhoto applications to recognize that my files are on the other drive and access them as needed, without requiring any extra input from me.

 

you could always upgrade your hard drive haha, not super hard depending what kind of macbook. and owc or macsales.com sells them at a decent price.

 

Yea that was originally an option but I dont wanna do much to it being that Ill be selling it in about 6 months and buying a new iMac. I already have an external and was hoping to use it to remedy my super slow system.

Thank you though. I appreciate the advice.

 

well if your system is slow i would definately recommend solid state hard drives. no moving parts. and ultra fast. but since you dont wanna up grade im not sure about the software. also when you get an imac make sure to get one with an SSD to run the OS off of. it will be supppeerrr fast with one. then like a bigger one for storage. im actually thinking about building a multi OS system and its basically gonna be a mac pro but with pc parts. little tricky but can be done haha. good luck i hope it works out

 

that cool. those solid states are sooo expensive though.

iMacs can run dual drives?

 

haha sorry im not sure. SSDs are the SHIIITTT tho. seriously tho. i would get one because they are awesome. they come at a premium. but they make your system smoother. and i dont think imacs can run dual drives. you can just get a mac pro haha jk nobody has the monies for those

 

lol. Those mac pros are sooo sick with 12 cores, 6 RAM slots, 4 HD Bays and a $10k+ price when configured right. I wish. Photo editting would be soo much easier.

Im sure as time progresses (as with all technology) those solid states will come down in price.

 

I'm not totally sure about Itunes, I use a different player, but a fair number of media players these days will let you import songs from an external drive. Then if the drive is not present they detect the missing folder and hide anything that was in it from your song list. Plug drive back in and restart the player, now all that content is showing again.

I know rhythmbox does this. Worth a try with Itunes. FYI, Amarok uses a lot of the same libraries for data access as rhythmbox so it's likely to have the same functionality. It's also available for OSX.

SSD's are nice, but kinda limited on storage. So, yeah, dual drive with a high capacity magnetic drive for storage. Run the OS+swap off the SSD.

The total system performance is going to vary a lot though, depending on what type of work the system is doing. CPU or RAM intensive stuff, like encoding/transcoding/compiling will not be substantially impacted as the choke point in the system isn't the HDD access. Anything your doing online isn't going to be impacted either, network lag is the choke point there. System boot time, and program launch times will be much lower though.

I decided not to go this route myself as the stuff I really want to speed up wouldn't really be helped by a SSD.

Good luck in whatever you decide to do.

 

just format the external for apple and drop your files into it...you'll have to re-sync your itunes and iphoto with the "new" files though. as long as the hard drive is hooked up, it should work fine til you get your new one.

 

I would usually say get a new internal (320 GB) for like $80 and reformat. But since you are getting rid of it, you can plug in your drive and manually manage your music instead of using auto sync. For intensive photo editing, I would recommend at least the 15" MBP ($1799) or the iMac 21.5" with the 1TB HDD and ATI Radeon HD 5670 ($1499).