File sharing over wi-fi

[Natural Science]

Hi gang,

I just got a new MBP and have an '09 imac with a 1TB HD... the imac currently has roughly 600g in data from imovie, iphoto & itunes. My question is am I better off copying the material onto the MBP as I need it and will that speed up the opening process? For example, I go through finder to the imac and open the iphoto library and it takes a good 5 minutes to open. I'm sure it'd be quicker to copy the pictures onto the MBP but then I'm worried about keeping the files straight (my wife is working on several iphoto books and I'd like to start doing some imovie/iweb work as well). Would buying an airport allow both computers to access the same files quicker (the imac is running time machine on a 1TB external HD through USB)


Thanks for any help!

 

[jdechko]

A wired network is going to be a lot faster for file transfers than a wireless network, even if the wireless is 802.11n. Local data will be a lot faster to be accessed than network sharing.

For iTunes, you should look into home sharing. As long as iTunes on the iMac is open, you can copy songs to iTunes on the MBP. You can even do streaming from the iMac to the MBP. For streaming, even video, a wireless network would be fast enough.