How to split up a large iTunes Media folder onto different drives?

[acosmichippo]

Hi everyone. Not too long ago I committed to digital-only media, which i am very happy with. The problem i am running into now is that my iTunes media folder is now only 100GB or so shy of the 2TB mark, so it will soon outgrow the largest of hard drives available. I have considered getting a RAID card for my Mac Pro to setup a RAID 0 with two 2TB drives, but I don't think i should have to drop $700 just to get my iTunes media organized onto any of the four 2TB drives i already have.

Ideally i would like to move my Movies folder (650GB) to one drive, TV shows(850GB) to another, and everything else to yet another folder. The problem i foresee with this strategy is that iTunes will no longer "Keep iTunes media Folder organized" or "Copy files to iTunes media folder when adding to library". It would be a huge pain to have to manually manage the file structure of such a huge library.

I have also tried leaving an alias ("Movies" for example) that points to my movies folder on a separate drive, but iTunes doesn't seem to want to follow the alias.

Anyway, i figured this scenario has to have come up before, and there may be some other solutions out there. Any help would be most appreciated.

 

[GGJstudios]

Did you try the suggestion provided in response to the other thread you started two hours ago?

http://discussions.info.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2408858&tstart=0

 

[acosmichippo]

actually, yes.

but thanks for the suggestion.

 

[mcruzader]

You really don't have to spend $700 on a raid card, all you need to use is disk utility, choose the drives you want to raid, choose the raid type, in this case striped and put you stuff on the drives, be aware to back up whatever you have on the drives before raiding as everything will be lost.

 

[acosmichippo]

You really don't have to spend $700 on a raid card, all you need to use is disk utility, choose the drives you want to raid, choose the raid type, in this case striped and put you stuff on the drives, be aware to back up whatever you have on the drives before raiding as everything will be lost.

wow. serious thanks involved here. totally figured a raid card would be needed to make a raid array, and never thought to actually check disk utility.

will give this a shot. this will solve a lot of problems for me.

 

[BayouTiger]

I also have this situation. I moved mine to a LaCie Big4Quadra 6TB, but that is a very expensive solution. It is, however a very fast Raid5 volume and holds my Itunes database on one volume and Time Machine on another. I periodically back up my iTunes manually with external drives (one for Movies, one for Music, etc) and ChronoSync. I have had too many hard drives fail over the years to ever consider a striped array again for anything other than a scratch disk.

I have just moved from my old 2006 Mac Pro with all 4 bays full and a 30" ACD to an i7 iMac and the Big4 external and I love this setup!