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iTunes outgrowing my 4tb drive

M

Mindprey

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 8, 2013
44
0
So I have then adding to my iTunes library quite a bit lately, and now my 4 TB drive is about to run out of space. I have a Probox with room for a total of 16tb. How do I best go about expanding my iTunes library at this point? The majority of my iTunes library are my HD movies. I would like to keep the next storage solution to a reasonable cost (ie, not a $600 box plus another $600 in drives), and keep the storage as a DAS to my late 2012 Mac Mini. The Mac mini acts as my itunes and photo server for my house.

Right now I have three 4tb Seagate drives in my Probox. Should I buy a fourth, and try to do a RAID 0 on the first two drives, then back them up on the next two drives?

Any input is greatly appreciated.
 
P

paulrbeers

macrumors 68040
Dec 17, 2009
3,963
123
Mindprey said:
So I have then adding to my iTunes library quite a bit lately, and now my 4 TB drive is about to run out of space. I have a Probox with room for a total of 16tb. How do I best go about expanding my iTunes library at this point? The majority of my iTunes library are my HD movies. I would like to keep the next storage solution to a reasonable cost (ie, not a $600 box plus another $600 in drives), and keep the storage as a DAS to my late 2012 Mac Mini. The Mac mini acts as my itunes and photo server for my house.

Right now I have three 4tb Seagate drives in my Probox. Should I buy a fourth, and try to do a RAID 0 on the first two drives, then back them up on the next two
Any input is greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

iTunes can span multiple drives as long as you turn off the "copy to..." Option in preferences. Mine actually spans 4 different drives because I keep my music on one RAID 1, my iTunes purchases on my OS drive, my DVD rips on another RAID 1, and my BluRay rips on a 3rd RAID 1.
 
M

Mindprey

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 8, 2013
44
0
paulrbeers said:
iTunes can span multiple drives as long as you turn off the "copy to..." Option in preferences. Mine actually spans 4 different drives because I keep my music on one RAID 1, my iTunes purchases on my OS drive, my DVD rips on another RAID 1, and my BluRay rips on a 3rd RAID 1.
Click to expand...

Should I set up a RAID disk or JBOD to do this?
 
M

Mindprey

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 8, 2013
44
0
Forgive my ignorance, but how do I add a drive and let itunes know that different data is on separate drives?
 
L

linds15

macrumors 6502a
Oct 16, 2012
535
1
Great White North
Mindprey said:
Forgive my ignorance, but how do I add a drive and let itunes know that different data is on separate drives?
Click to expand...

in your itunes settings, go to advanced, and if you uncheck the option to "copy files to itunes media folder when adding to library" then itunes will read the file from wherever it is dropped into itunes from.

for example, i have an internal hdd with music, and external with tv/movies. music is stored and read from the internal, and when i rip a movie i transfer it to my external, drag it into itunes, and thats it. so you can just keep adding external drives
 
M

Mindprey

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 8, 2013
44
0
linds15 said:
in your itunes settings, go to advanced, and if you uncheck the option to "copy files to itunes media folder when adding to library" then itunes will read the file from wherever it is dropped into itunes from.

for example, i have an internal hdd with music, and external with tv/movies. music is stored and read from the internal, and when i rip a movie i transfer it to my external, drag it into itunes, and thats it. so you can just keep adding external drives
Click to expand...

Okay, gotcha. Thank you for simplifying the process. I was starting to look at storage sot ions that we're going to cost me hundreds of dollars, but I already have the drives and system setup for this.
 
famous600

famous600

macrumors 6502a
Apr 8, 2010
705
1
Mindprey said:
Okay, gotcha. Thank you for simplifying the process. I was starting to look at storage sot ions that we're going to cost me hundreds of dollars, but I already have the drives and system setup for this.
Click to expand...

So you have 12tb of storage? Do you have it set up so each drive is read individually? I personally have four 3tb drives in a drobo 5d which is essentially a raid 5 set up.
 
M

Mindprey

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 8, 2013
44
0
famous600 said:
So you have 12tb of storage? Do you have it set up so each drive is read individually? I personally have four 3tb drives in a drobo 5d which is essentially a raid 5 set up.
Click to expand...

They are read individually. They are in a Mediasonic Probox
 
Richdmoore

Richdmoore

macrumors 68000
Jul 24, 2007
1,956
355
Troutdale, OR
I am doing my iTunes media drive another way, as I found that I liked having iTunes manage my library all in one place vs a reference library of links.

I use a JBOD setup consisting of two external firewire drives, a WD 3tb and a WD 2 tb.

Of course, there is no redundancy with a JBOD, so I have two more drives (USB 2) as a Backup JBOD. These also consist of a 3tb & 2 tb drive set.

I use Superduper to clone the firewire JBOD to the usb JBOD sets, and to keep them in sync whenever I connect the USB drives. I usually keep the USB drives disconnected unless I am actually going to sync them, Superduper has an option to run automatically upon connecting the USB drives.

It would be great to get a full raid enclosure, and run with all the drives as one unit, but I find this setup to be easier as I already had the existing USB & firewire external drives.
 
A

ammar17

macrumors newbie
Jun 29, 2013
12
0
Germany
linds15 said:
..and when i rip a movie i transfer it to my external, drag it into itunes, and thats it. so you can just keep adding external drives
Click to expand...

This is very interesting to me, as I am in the process of building an iTunes library and use it centrally as a media server for my place. I currently have a 1T Toshiba external carrying it around and sometimes hooking it up to my Extreme if I know I won't be traveling or something similar.

So my question is if I have several external hooked up on several points on the network, I can open my iTunes main library and "Ctrl + O" a file on any external and having that file added to my library but not adding the size of the file to the external the library is on?
 
L

linds15

macrumors 6502a
Oct 16, 2012
535
1
Great White North
ammar17 said:
This is very interesting to me, as I am in the process of building an iTunes library and use it centrally as a media server for my place. I currently have a 1T Toshiba external carrying it around and sometimes hooking it up to my Extreme if I know I won't be traveling or something similar.

So my question is if I have several external hooked up on several points on the network, I can open my iTunes main library and "Ctrl + O" a file on any external and having that file added to my library but not adding the size of the file to the external the library is on?
Click to expand...
not quite sure exactly what you're asking, however, i can tell you itunes will read a file regardless of where it is located, as long as you tell it where it is. this is all dependent on having the setting where itunes copies files added to the library to its own folder off. when such setting is on, itunes will copy the file that you add from the external, and place it in the itunes library to read it from there.
 
famous600

famous600

macrumors 6502a
Apr 8, 2010
705
1
linds15 said:
not quite sure exactly what you're asking, however, i can tell you itunes will read a file regardless of where it is located, as long as you tell it where it is. this is all dependent on having the setting where itunes copies files added to the library to its own folder off. when such setting is on, itunes will copy the file that you add from the external, and place it in the itunes library to read it from there.
Click to expand...

I have done the same thing in regards to an iTunes library. However it is hit or miss on playback. Sometimes a video won't play, sometimes no audio. They are all encoded correctly, now that I use plex and not a single issue
 
aawil

aawil

macrumors 6502a
May 18, 2008
542
165
Speaking of 4TB drives what's the most reliable? I'm currently using a 3TB WD Red drive and planning to move up to a 4TB drive eventually.
 
M

Mindprey

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 8, 2013
44
0
Richdmoore said:
I am doing my iTunes media drive another way, as I found that I liked having iTunes manage my library all in one place vs a reference library of links.

I use a JBOD setup consisting of two external firewire drives, a WD 3tb and a WD 2 tb.

Of course, there is no redundancy with a JBOD, so I have two more drives (USB 2) as a Backup JBOD. These also consist of a 3tb & 2 tb drive set.

I use Superduper to clone the firewire JBOD to the usb JBOD sets, and to keep them in sync whenever I connect the USB drives. I usually keep the USB drives disconnected unless I am actually going to sync them, Superduper has an option to run automatically upon connecting the USB drives.

It would be great to get a full raid enclosure, and run with all the drives as one unit, but I find this setup to be easier as I already had the existing USB & firewire external drives.
Click to expand...

I think I am going to go a route similar to this. I don't want to spend another $500-600 to buy a RAID Array, and would rather turn my Mediasonic Probox into two JBOD 8 TB drives. One would hold iTunes, and the other would be a backup that I can pull out of the Mediasonic Probox and keep somewhere else.

Did you just use the Disk Utility program to do this?

----------
aawil said:
Speaking of 4TB drives what's the most reliable? I'm currently using a 3TB WD Red drive and planning to move up to a 4TB drive eventually.
Click to expand...

I have been using Seagate 4tb internal drives (about $155 on Amazon) for over a year and (knock on wood) have had good performance with them.
 
Richdmoore

Richdmoore

macrumors 68000
Jul 24, 2007
1,956
355
Troutdale, OR
Yes, I used disk utility to create the raid drives, and superduper to copy the "permanent" drive onto backup raid for redundancy.

Here is the guide I used:
http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/ss/raidjbod_2.htm
 
M

Mindprey

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 8, 2013
44
0
What a long month it has been. I tried doing the JBOD format using disk utility, and combined 4 4 terabyte hard drives into 2 8 terabyte hard drives. It worked for about a week, but then JBOD 1, which housed my 4+ terabyte itunes library stopped being able to write to the disks. I did a backup on JBOD 2, ejected JBOD 2 for safe keeping, and reformatted JBOD 1 (iTunes). After the reformat, and creating JBOD1 again, I was ready to copy my itunes backup from JBOD 2. When I inserted the two 4 tb drives, osx couldn't recognize one of the drives. Fast forward to a week later, and paying a data revovery company $500, and I had 95% of my data recovered.

Needless to say, I am no longer using the JBOD format. I got a Drobo 5D, and am looking for the right hard drives to use in it, and that will be my main and only itunes library once I load it with 5 4tb drives using double redundancy.

Have no idea what happened with the JBOD sets, but I will never do that again. I could have nearly purchased the Drobo 5D for what I paid in data recovery.
 
M

mcnallym

macrumors 65816
Oct 28, 2008
1,181
911
Mindprey said:
What a long month it has been. I tried doing the JBOD format using disk utility, and combined 4 4 terabyte hard drives into 2 8 terabyte hard drives. It worked for about a week, but then JBOD 1, which housed my 4+ terabyte itunes library stopped being able to write to the disks. I did a backup on JBOD 2, ejected JBOD 2 for safe keeping, and reformatted JBOD 1 (iTunes). After the reformat, and creating JBOD1 again, I was ready to copy my itunes backup from JBOD 2. When I inserted the two 4 tb drives, osx couldn't recognize one of the drives. Fast forward to a week later, and paying a data revovery company $500, and I had 95% of my data recovered.

Needless to say, I am no longer using the JBOD format. I got a Drobo 5D, and am looking for the right hard drives to use in it, and that will be my main and only itunes library once I load it with 5 4tb drives using double redundancy.

Have no idea what happened with the JBOD sets, but I will never do that again. I could have nearly purchased the Drobo 5D for what I paid in data recovery.
Click to expand...

That sounds more like 2 x RAID0 stripes created, if combined 4 x 4 into two x 8, so that isn't JBOD which would have been 4 x 4Tb Drives.
If one disk in a RAID0 goes then the complete RAID Volume is no longer accessible.

Reading your entry then it sounds like you started to have problems on the first RAID and so backed up from one RAID0 to the Second RAID0 and then formatted the first RAID0 and your Second RAID0 had a disk fail so was lost, or possibly backed up the issue that was having that prevented writing to the 1st RAID0, and this corrupted the Second RAID0.

If looking at the Drobo5D then would suggest the WD Reds, or Seagate NAS drives. Both are mentioned on the Drobo site. The Seagate NAS may be 5900 but for serving iTunes this is fine.
 
M

Mildredop

macrumors 68020
Oct 14, 2013
2,478
1,510
Mindprey said:
So I have then adding to my iTunes library quite a bit lately, and now my 4 TB drive is about to run out of space. I have a Probox with room for a total of 16tb. How do I best go about expanding my iTunes library at this point? The majority of my iTunes library are my HD movies. I would like to keep the next storage solution to a reasonable cost (ie, not a $600 box plus another $600 in drives), and keep the storage as a DAS to my late 2012 Mac Mini. The Mac mini acts as my itunes and photo server for my house.

Right now I have three 4tb Seagate drives in my Probox. Should I buy a fourth, and try to do a RAID 0 on the first two drives, then back them up on the next two drives?

Any input is greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

I thought this idea of terrabytes of storage holding hours of music was all over. Why not just join Spotify or Google Unlimited? All the music you want.

Say you're about to spend $600 in storage, that's 5yrs of premium Spotify membership. And that's not including the amount you'd spend buying more music to fill the extra storage.

Problem solved!
 
M

Mindprey

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 8, 2013
44
0
nebo1ss said:
I have to ask the question what is you back-up strategy?
Click to expand...

I was using smart backup from Mac OSX store, but when I was using the JBOD setup, I might have copied a corrupted disk set.

Now I am going to use a Drobo 5D with 3 or 4 4tb drives as my main itunes library, then have a software RAID set up with 2 4tb drives in an enclosure for backup.

----------
Mildredop said:
Oh, sorry. I forgot iTunes also did the movies side of things. I've always thought they should change the name.

Well, there's always Netflix etc., too...
Click to expand...

Yeah, my music collection is only about 60 gb, the movie side is 3.6tb and growing.
 
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