Alright, I've never used a laptop as my MAIN computer before and I should have thought about this prior to buying one, but... I have a new 17" MacBook Pro with the 200GB 7200RPM hard drive. My music collection however, is over 100GB. What would be the best way to take my music with me when I need it? My plan was to keep everything on an external at home and buy a 160GB ipod and use that to take around with me but I'm curious to know if there are any better solutions? I don't want to carry around my external with me because then I need a outlet for the power for it.
Why not store your music directly on the hard drive? My collection takes up half of my drivespace, but I've still got plenty of room for other stuff besides the operating system and programs installed.
If you think about it..there's no time that you're going to be listening from your computer without headphones if you are 'on the go', Why not get a 160GB Ipod and keep your music on an external drive for use at home base? Just a suggestion. I personally just revamped my music collection and disregarded everything I was tired of or didn't like...but it slowly grew to about the size it was.
I always kept my music on a small external drive. It's really not that bad to just plug in a drive when you want to listen to music. Or you could put half on an external and what you really listen to on the internal. It takes some thinking to plan it out, but then it just becomes habit to keep it organized.
I have all my music (60GB's of it) on my hard drive. It has to be on my laptop - I'd hate to have to carry around an external hard drive and have to plug it in every time I wanted to listen to some music.
I'd definitely go the iPod route. Some of the MacBook Pros have a serious noise problem with audio, while the iPod sound will be nice and clean.
You can get a USB powered hard drive like the Western Digital Passport. They are up to 320GB, small and don't need a power supply.
I'd store it on my computer but that leaves me with very little room. Without any applications installed, I have 160GB of free space on the computer. I might just do the passport idea or the ipod. The iPod would be usuefull because I can take it everywhere vs just a hard drive.
I've got an external LaCie Little Big Disc, holding all 120gb of my music. It connects to my MBP w/FW800, which powers it as well, so no need for AC. I considered going the giant iPod route but I need access to the files for editing, transferring between devices, etc. I also didn't want that much music on my iPod. Too much to sort through. If you do go with the external drive, be sure to back up regularly. If you drop or lose it, you're screwed.