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Does anyone else get slow info processing using an external for itunes library?

O

oftheheavens

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 9, 2008
1,988
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cherry point
I have my iTunes library on my 1TB external, and recently I have noticed that when I do stuff like changing the genre on songs that it takes a while to process. Anyone else having this problem? I have contacted WD and they said to try a new USB cable and then if that didn't work, to reformat it. So right now I am in the process of moving the 700gb to my imac so that i can try to reformat.

Still I was wondering if anyone else encounters this when changing info in iTunes.

Thanks!
 
You are using an external via usb? That might be the reason.

I had my library on a firewire based external and really didn't see an issue with it.

I have since moved it to another computer (ala sudo server). But when it was on the external it wasn't bad.

You say 700 gigs of content, what is the size and speed of the drive?
 
My computer is on an external 1tb USB drive, but I'm running a moderately fast computer and don't see any issues with it.
 
USB will severely bottleneck a 1TB desktop drive. Most USB drives top out around 30-35MB/s. The drive itself is probably capable of close to triple that. If you are moving large files around that drive a lot, you may want to use Firewire instead.
 
update: reformatted, got the media back on to the HD, deleted it off my internal.

testing: highlighted about 25 songs in itunes and changed the genre from punk to alternative. It was instantaneous, as well as the change back.

Conclusion: I would have to say that it was due to the MS Dos formatting that was causing the major bottle neck on minor file changes. Never even realized that it was formatted as such on my macbook, but when my i7 was struggling it made me annoyed enough to look into it.

hope that this may help someone else in the future, and thanks for the input everyone!
 
I don't know if its the size of my library (lots of tracks, lots of videos) but editing album art or batch processing a bunch of names will sometimes goes very slowly. To the point where it appears to have crashed. This is on an external 320gb drive, USB2, OSX.
 
I have the same report as the poster above only mine is on a NAS connected via gigabit Ethernet.
 
try what i did, using disk utility. i have about 15gb of music, and about 700gb of movies. i have been playing with it for about 3 hours now and still no slow down.
 
me too

Hello,
I know I'm probably bringing up a very old topic here, but I am having the same problem with a WD Elements 1 TB External Hard drive, which I believe it's the same as used by oftheheavens.

My settings:
  • MacBook with OSX 10.6.4
  • WD Elements 1 TB External Hard Drive connected by USB2.0

I found this topic while searching on Google, and I'd like to know what's the best file system to use on my device. I am currently using factory settings, so NTFS. As OSX cannot write natively on a NTFS hard drive, I am also using NTFS-3G. Anyway, things here are really damn slow, it takes around half an hour to write 5 GB (Mac -> external). The most awkward point is that if I'm copying FROM the hard drive, I actually get more decent speed. 3 minutes for 5 GB.

Thanks.. :D
 
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