Need Hard-Drive/iTunes advice

There was a bug in iTunes with a limitation of the number of songs in the Library, and I'm not sure if that has been fixed yet. Maybe someone else can shed some light on that.

As for the RAID, be careful how you set it up. If you use 3 300GB drives for a total of usable space of 900Gb, then you are running RAID 0 and it is not fault tolerant. This means if any of the drives fail, you've lost the data. After the number of years you spent getting the music, I doubt you would want to take that risk.

Your better bet is to get 4 300GB (900GB usable) drives or 5 250GB (1 TB or 1000GB), or even 6 200GB (1 TB or 1000GB) drives and run RAID 5. Sure, the performance is not the same as RAID 0, but playing music files isn't exactly high I/O. You might look into one of the new Firewire 1TB drives as well. They may not provide the fault tolerance of RAID 5, but it may be cheaper.

And yes, the iTunes Library can exist on another drive. We have a G4 Digital Audio setup this way. Just go to iTunes, then Preferences, and under the Advanced tab, you can set the Library location.

Note also in iTunes there is no need (beyond keeping everything titdy) that all your music exists in the Library folder. There is a preference called something like "Keep my Library organised". If you uncheck this iTunes will leave music files where they are when you add them to your Library. So you can get 3 300Gb drives and not bother with RAID at all! Simply split your music across the 3 drives. When you need more space just add another drive.

powder8 said:

This is a two part question but both questions deal with different aspects of the same "problem".

I switched to Mac just a little over a year ago, so my knowledge is still in the growth stage.

Even though I switched I could not transfer all my files to my Mac at the time as I could not afford the nessacary hard drives. Now I have the money and want to move my files.... What I have is a huge amount of music... I have 780gb that needs to come off my old PC server so I can throw that POS away.... last count over 4500 complete full length albums.... Four years of college and borrowing every music collection from every friend I came to know at school and my best friend doing the same thing got us this music collection... So what I need to know is this... if I buy (3) 300gb HD and stick them in my G4 running 10.3.3 can I just run a software raid and have them show up as one 900gb drive? If it is possible what are the exact steps I need to take... Then if that is possible can your iTunes music library not be on the hard-drive that your OS is on? Then will iTunes recognize all the songs? I have seen at http://www.iTunesregistry.com a guy that has 50,000 songs listed (my current libray of my favorite stuff that I must have is ranked 41st)... About a year ago I though I read on some forum a post from a guy saying his iTunes maxed out at 33,333 and that it was some weird Unix problem... I have no idea if that is true and that is why I'm asking....

Thanks to anyone who can answer any of these questions!

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its goood to hear someone else is serious about music. i would put it in RAID then it will work. Id prefer to keep itunes organized without having to do the work manually. if you dont mind making your own folders and constantly opening tons of windows to organize your music then you don't need to RAID it.

I've got over 220Gb of music on my mac on the WD 2500JB. Some 9,400+ songs, with the majority in AIFF which is what i assume you have yours as also. I'm also part of the registry and I would love to fit the rest of my music in itunes. Forget those 300GB maxtor drives at 5400K and try the 7K400. get 3 of these 400GB drives and you'll be over 1 TB. What i personally do is buy the largest 7200K drive on the market, right now its still the 250GB until the 7K400 starts selling next month. Then move my entire library over to the new larger hard drive. then in boot drive I keep music that is waiting to be added to the library. These album folders are already organized and edited in peak and basically just wait to be tagged and added. So say an album has 3 songs that I really like but the other 9 songs are blah, the 3 good songs get added while the other 9 sit and wait for more storage. Ive done this from the base 120GB that came in my Powermac. Then to 200GB library and now its 250GB. Pretty soon it's going to go up to 400GB and I will be selling the 200GB just like i did with the 120GB orginally.

As for the peak in itunes, don't worry. There was an aparant 32K peak but that was years ago with itunes 3, if that guy has 50K+ itunes obviously supports more. Well im done ranting.

Tyler

i might be wrong....but wouldn't getting a lacie bigger disk (1 terabyte) cost about the same as 3 300g drives... then at least you wouldn't have to bother with raid

TyleRomeo said:

...get 3 of these 400GB drives and you'll be over 1 TB...

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Keep in mind that a RAID 5 with 3 400GB will only yield 800GB usable, not 1.2 TB. Again, I just want to warn you that RAID 0 does not implement any fault tolerance, so it might as well be single disk drive.

btw I'm 65th under musicmaniac

Tyler