Multiple Hard Drive Question

[Rushli0n]

Ok, so I have been wondering how to accomplish this:

My current setup is just one 1 TB external HDD which is where my iTunes library currently sits. I have about 300 GB left of space. If I was to purchase a 2nd external drive to store additional movies, etc...can I just point the 2nd to the 1st (or vice versa)? Does anyone have a similar setup and can confirm this works?

Thinking about it, it shouldn't work any differently then having your iTunes library sitting on your machine and pointing it to the files sitting on an external. I just wanted to make sure doing this with two externals would also work.

The major issue I can see is that I can no longer just drop a .mp4 file into iTunes and have it copy down to the external. I'm not sure how it would know which external to put it in.

 

[jdblas69]

This is possible, I think for sure you need to make sure under preferences>advanced that you leave both of these UNCHECKED "keep itunes media folder organized" and "Copy files to itunes media folder when adding to library". If you don't like you pointed out when you add new media it may not add to the external you want and also you might get duplicate files. You are just going to have do more manual managing of your itunes library.

 

[mic j]

I move the file to the drive. Then "Add to Library" in iTunes.

 

[unplugme71]

1. Close iTunes.

2. Move the 'Movies' folder from your first hard drive to your second hard drive.

3. Create an alias of Movies on your second hard drive, move the alias to where the 'Movies' folder existed on your first hard drive.

4. Open iTunes.

5. Done.

Whenever a new movie is downloaded, it'll be on your second hard drive. If the second hard drive is not turned on, iTunes will not see any movies and the links will be broken until you turn the second drive on and restart iTunes.

This is the cheap/easy method.

Option 2 is to buy a USB 3.0 RAID storage array. Load it up with 4 drives in RAID 5, 6 or 10. Now your computer sees 1 drive instead of 4. You also have some redundancy in case one drive fails.

I don't backup my itunes because it can always be downloaded again. Plus I have a copy of some stuff on my iPhone (music, apps), iPad (books, music, apps), and iPod Classic (movies).

 

[Richdmoore]

I have a large library of movies since I have been converting my DVD/bluray to an Apple TV compatible format. I was coping them to an external drive (hooked to my AirPort Extreme) then holding the option key while dragging them into my library, so the only link, not copy.

Anyway, it works, but I am changing things up. I am setting up a FireWire "Concatenated Disk Set" software raid, (built into osx) since I can add more disks as needed as my library grows.

I backup to separate USB hard drives as well when I convert the movies, just in case of a drive failure, which is a disadvantage of this raid setup.