Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Running iTunes off External Storage

Superman730

Superman730

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 25, 2012
133
96
This should be in the correct forum, if not, sorry mods!

I just purchased a mid-2014 rMBP 13 inch. I got the 256GB hard drive, but I have a significant iPhoto library and I do a bunch of stuff in iMovie for fun that will use a lot of space. I had 200GB in my old computer and I ended up deleting all of my music from the drive to get some space back (I have it all on a Mac Mini that we use for syncing our iOS devices, so I didn't lose anything! lol).

With this new machine, I was thinking of keeping an iTunes library (some music and movies, not everything) on an external device. I was thinking about either a microSD card with an adapter similar to Nifty or a low profile USB 3 stick. Has anyone tried this? Do you have any recommendations as to which would work better, especially for the occasional HD iTunes movie. Does iTunes handle this sort of thing well? I'd try to not open it without the device in. Honestly, if it's in the SD card slot, I probably would never need to take it out.

Thanks in advance for anyone who replies!
 
Superman730 said:
This should be in the correct forum, if not, sorry mods!

I just purchased a mid-2014 rMBP 13 inch. I got the 256GB hard drive, but I have a significant iPhoto library and I do a bunch of stuff in iMovie for fun that will use a lot of space. I had 200GB in my old computer and I ended up deleting all of my music from the drive to get some space back (I have it all on a Mac Mini that we use for syncing our iOS devices, so I didn't lose anything! lol).

With this new machine, I was thinking of keeping an iTunes library (some music and movies, not everything) on an external device. I was thinking about either a microSD card with an adapter similar to Nifty or a low profile USB 3 stick. Has anyone tried this? Do you have any recommendations as to which would work better, especially for the occasional HD iTunes movie. Does iTunes handle this sort of thing well? I'd try to not open it without the device in. Honestly, if it's in the SD card slot, I probably would never need to take it out.

Thanks in advance for anyone who replies!
Click to expand...

I add music and movies to iTunes from external media of all kinds. This is so my internal drive doesn't get full. I make sure I don't 'Copy files to iTunes media folder when adding to library' within iTunes >Advanced prefs. This works well, playing from thumb drive, SSD or Ext HD, as long as they are mounted.
 
Alimar said:
I add music and movies to iTunes from external media of all kinds. This is so my internal drive doesn't get full. I make sure I don't 'Copy files to iTunes media folder when adding to library' within iTunes >Advanced prefs. This works well, playing from thumb drive, SSD or Ext HD, as long as they are mounted.
Click to expand...

Great! Thanks! My main concern was if there'd be enough throughput on the SD card to play the HD iTunes movies. I really like the idea of putting a microSD in and kind of just forgetting it exists. Ideally, I'd get a 128 gig micro but I have to wait until they come down in price. For that much, with the adapter I could have just upgraded my hard drive to 512 and not worried as much! Thinking about getting a Nifty and a 64 gig for now.
 
This is one of the questions I'd been needing an answer to, so thanks. I'm going to get a 128gb Transcend Jetdrive.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back