Best way to put music and photos on external hard drive?

K

kmarketing

macrumors 6502

Original poster

• Dec 4, 2006

• #1

Hi,

I have a 250gb external hard drive that I'd like to use to store our photos and music, etc. What is the best way to do that?

Should I install an operating system on that hard drive first, or do I just format the drive and put the folders and files in?

Also, on the dual g4 that I use, it has panther osx 10.3 on it right now, and on the macbook pro it is tiger osx 10.4. Will that matter? Should I upgrade the dual g4 (450mhz) to tiger?

thanks!

 

steelphantom

macrumors 6502a

• Dec 4, 2006

• #2

I have a 200GB external drive that I use for that exact same purpose. I formatted the drive and then moved the music/photo folders from my computer to the external drive. Remember to change the location of your iTunes and iPhoto libraries, since they'll be on the external hard drive and not on your computer anymore.

 

K

kmarketing

macrumors 6502

Original poster

• Dec 4, 2006

• #3

Hi,

So you didn't install the os then?

how's that solution been working for you? We have a ton of stuff and i think by clearing that out onto the external hard drive, it should make our computers run even better. What do you think?

thanks!

 

steelphantom

macrumors 6502a

• Dec 4, 2006

• #4

kmarketing said:

Hi,

So you didn't install the os then?

how's that solution been working for you? We have a ton of stuff and i think by clearing that out onto the external hard drive, it should make our computers run even better. What do you think?

thanks!

Click to expand...

No, you don't have to install an OS on the external drive. Think of the external drive as extension of your computer's main file storage. I have all of my photos and videos on my external drive because my laptop's measly 40GB hard drive would be full otherwise. Your computer isn't going to be running any faster by having your photos/music on an external drive, but it will free up a lot of space on your computer's main hard drive.