External Hard Drive File System Question

[Harmush]

I use an external hard drive on my MacBookPro for iTunes. I have my full library stored on it. Its pretty slow to delete songs from the library and load them to play.
The file system on the disk is FAT32

If I use disk utility to make an image of the disk and format it to OSX (extended) file system will the image i made restore to the disk? Even though it started as a different file system.

And also will it mess up my iTunes library, will I have to re-add it all because that took me about 6 hours to transfer it to the hard drive in the first place. (Its a pretty large library)

 

[sammich]

You can just copy all the files off into a temporary folder on your computer, then format your external drive then copy everything back over.

As long as you keep all the files the same way, then iTunes will have no problem figuring out where your files are.

 

[spinnerlys]

Why the need to make an image if you just can copy all the data via Finder to another HDD and preserve the file and folder structure anyway?

 

[iBookG4user]

What you might be running into is that the hard drive is not "spun up" when you try to load a song. If you load a song and then after it has started playing, try to load another song, does the new song take a long time to start playing as well?

 

[Harmush]

They all take a long time, well a 2-3 seconds after clicking them to the song actually playing.
I have two Maxtor externals one in OSX file system and the new on in MSDOS. Load times on the OSX format one is much quicker for everything I have noticed. Does the file system really make that much difference?

 

[Harmush]

What you might be running into is that the hard drive is not "spun up" when you try to load a song. If you load a song and then after it has started playing, try to load another song, does the new song take a long time to start playing as well?

You can hear the disk spinning when itunes is loading. Even when you can hear it spinning at what sounds like full speed, it still takes a while to load songs. Its plugged into high speed USB and mains power so I don't think its a bandwidth problem. File system is the only difference I can think of.