iTunes on external Drive question

[admin_exported]

Hi,

a few months ago I bought the 1TB apple time capsule and I think its good. I then tried to move my itunes library across and it worked fine except I found it slow.

I know this sounds petty but there was maybe a few second delay when I clicked on a track or TV show etc. this was due to the delay in waiting for the HD to spin from idle but even once its spinning I found it slower than running iTunes on the the internal drive.

Would I experience the same with firewire external drives etc?

Also how does everyone else hold there itunes library and back it up?

my library is currently 218 gig and it's slowly out growing the internal drive. it's backed up hourly to my time capsule. I also do a 2nd back up to my iomega 250 gig fire wire drive every couple of months

 

[Anonymous]

There will be a delay using the Time Capsule to hold your library, especially if you have it hooked up wirelessly. Short answer, yes a firewire drive will be quicker. In fact, you probably won't be able to tell a difference between having your library on an internal drive or a firewire drive.

Personally, I keep my music on the computer(s) internal hard drive and the tv shows and movies on a networked hard drive and they are all backed up to another networked hard drive. I too will have a few seconds delay when I click on a movie or tv show, but thats expected since they are being sent wirelessly from a networked hard drive. I don't mind it with video (would annoy me with music though) and its not like I have a choice with a 102GB music collection and 310 plus movies and just under 500 tv episodes - its just way too much for my computers internal drives. Likewise, I have the music collection stored on the Apple tv internal drive and let the movies/tv shows stream over the network for the same reasons - I don't want a delay between songs when listening through the stereo but don't mind waiting 2 or 3 seconds for a movie to start. In your case, I'd probably put the library on the firewire drive and keep a backup on the Time Capsule, which insidently is exactly what they've designed it for as Time Machine works great with the Time Capsule - plus you won't have that annoying delay if you use the firewire drive.

 

[Anonymous]

H there,

I also have all my music stored on Time Capsule. Or more precisely: I rip my music and manage online buying to my iMac's hard drive. Once a day, I update a mirror image of my iTunes music folder to a Time Capsule (not through Time Machine but through a neat app called SuperFlexible Synchroniser). It is that Time Capsule folder that is used by my Sonos system to stream music all over my home. With Sonos (or when I point iTunes to the Time Capsule version of the music folder), I also experience 3 to 5 secs delay when I start it up, when it wakes up the Time Capsule, but after that all is smooth with no delay at all between songs or when I change the playlists.

On top of that, I use Time Machine to automatically backup my iMac on another Time Capsule. This gives me a total of 3 copies of my music folder on 3 devices, and I can easily store one of the Time Capsules in another location when I leave the apartment unoccupied for more than a day. Think this setup combines flexibility and security.