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TheDill

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 22, 2011
13
0
Cincinnati, OH
I just got my new MBA and was wondering if it would be a good idea to put my itunes library on my MBA or just keep it on an external hard drive? My library is only about 17GB and I currently have around 45GB of space left on my MBA hard drive. Will that take up too much of my memory or slow it down or anything? Thanks
 
Putting it on an external drive would actually make iTunes run slower, so if you don't need that hard drive space, it's better to have it on the SSD. But as your collection grows, and as you get other programs you want to run on your MacBook, it's likely that you'll eventually start running short on space, in which case you would have to move it to an external drive.
 
I have around 10GB in iTunes, so I just keep it on the Air. With a smaller library, if you have the space, there's no harm in keeping it on there. If you're worried that you may want that space later on, why not put it all on, then weed through and delete music that you don't really really want with you all the time?
 
Putting it on an external drive would actually make iTunes run slower, so if you don't need that hard drive space, it's better to have it on the SSD.

You could always put only the actual library index as well as the album artwork cache onto the SSD. In my case, that requires about 1GB of space for ~9000 songs.

Whether the audio files are on an HDD or SSD doesn't really make a difference performance-wise.
 
You could always put only the actual library index as well as the album artwork cache onto the SSD. In my case, that requires about 1GB of space for ~9000 songs.

Whether the audio files are on an HDD or SSD doesn't really make a difference performance-wise.

You are smart.
 
You could always put only the actual library index as well as the album artwork cache onto the SSD. In my case, that requires about 1GB of space for ~9000 songs.

Whether the audio files are on an HDD or SSD doesn't really make a difference performance-wise.

You are smart.

Yes, he/she is! There is no reason to keep your iTunes music files on SSD when you could put it all on external or better yet USB flash (depending on size limitations) and not suffer anything other than convenience. Whats nice about USB is if you dedicate one solely to music you wont ever wonder what else is on there...and its easily thrown into your bag, pocket etc.
 
I keep almost everything on my MBA. I do offload movies and TV shows to my external drive when I have viewed them.

If I could easily tell active APPs from inactive, I'd probably offload those as well.
 
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