New to Macs, need some help with ext. hard drive, etc.

[malnar]

I'm planning on buying a 13" Macbook Pro soon after 15 or so years on Windows. (And what a relief this is.) I'm a huge music freak and so have a GIANT music collection that I've ripped onto one hard drive at home, which is hovering about 300gb (I said it was huge, didn't I?) I know I can run a separate hard drive for that, but what I really wanted to do was put this on our home network (Linksys wrt54g paired with a Linksys cable modem) and have it be sharable with my wife, who is on an XP machine (not negotiable - she has to have this for work.) Is this doable? I need to be able to rip music to it frequently, as a current and on-going music freak. Please fill me in on everything I may need to know - I'm getting confused searching the forums trying to figure out what will and won't work.

 

[mgridgaway]

Well, it depends on exactly what you want to do. Do you want to keep the music in an external hard drive attached to your mac? Do you want to add a NAS unit to your network? Once you answer those questions the answer becomes more clear. Also, an idea of your budget would be very helpful. And since you have so much music, I hope you have it backed up. This is also something to consider.

However, you may find the following link helpful if you want to share files between two computers:

http://www.mac-connect.com/win_mac_samba.php

 

[Shake 'n' Bake]

Find an old PowerMac G4, pop some big IDE HDDs in there and then put your music on it. Give it a gigabit ethernet connection That's what I do. I put the music and videos and podcasts and whatnot out to an XPS 410 running Vista, a Mac mini running 10.5.7, and a Studio 1537 running Vista without any problems.

 

[malnar]

Well, it depends on exactly what you want to do. Do you want to keep the music in an external hard drive attached to your mac? Do you want to add a NAS unit to your network? Once you answer those questions the answer becomes more clear. Also, an idea of your budget would be very helpful. And since you have so much music, I hope you have it backed up. This is also something to consider.

However, you may find the following link helpful if you want to share files between two computers:

http://www.mac-connect.com/win_mac_samba.php

Shamefully, I don't have it backed up, and that's one of the things I want to accomplish here. I've been looking at Time Capsule, Airport Extreme, etc., trying to figure out if I even need anything beyond what I already have. I would prefer to not rely on my MBP for my wife to connect through (if I have to do that, I might as well just manager her Ipod on my MBP rather than have her do it through her computer.) My intent was to put all of the music on the network through the router, as I see can be done fairly easily with the Airport Extreme and an external hard drive connected by USB. But I read something about the format of the drive being an issue for Macs to write to, and this is where I have really no knowledge.

So, in short, what I really want is a RAID 1 setup on the router that I can write to from my MBP that I can access and she can access with XP. Failing that, I guess I would want something similar just for me on the MBP.

 

[malnar]

Will this work? Time Capsule for storing music, etc., plus a drive attached to the Time Capsule for backups? I realize Time Capsule itself is intended for backups, but can't Time Machine be setup to back up Time Capsule itself to another drive that is attached to it? (I am growing less and less concerned about having my wife access files on the drive - it seems to be causing more trouble than it is worth since she doesn't update her nano like I update my Iphone and 160gb Ipod.)