Switching to a rMBP: I don't want itunes movies taking up all my precious ssd space!?

[Soulweaponry]

I've switched to buying movies exclusively on iTunes and whoa what a surprise, it's taking up a bunch of space on my hard drive. Right now i have a 13 inch macbook pro with a 500 gig hard drive and after buying about 30 movies, i can see how storage space would be non existant by the time my little collection gets to something like 100 movies. This is a concern for when i switch to a retina macbook pro with a 500 gig hard drive. I don't want itunes taking up most of my precious itunes space!

So what should i do? Would it be better to keep my movies in the cloud instead of stored locally? Would that work? Or is there some way i could easily offload the itunes movies to an external hard drive for easy access later?

 

[duervo]

Either delete and re-download movies when you start to run out of space, purchase a single-drive external storage unit of some type, or start saving up for a small NAS (my recommendation.)

http://www.synology.com is my first choice for NAS.

I checked out QNAP, NetGear, Western Digital, and Synology when I did my research last year. Although my requirements are a lot more "robust" than yours (i.e.: I'm running VMware's ESXi at home for work-related reasons.) I needed something that included support for iSCSI, NFS, and (if possible) VAAI support for the VMware virtual disks, which the Synology line does now as of v4.1.

As you begin to accumulate more movies over the years, your storage needs will grow, as you've already noticed. So, I would start with a 2-bay NAS enclosure minimum, with 2TB drives in each bay, mirrored. If you feel that 2TB won't be enough, your next option is to either get 3TB or 4TB drives, or a 4 or 5-bay NAS enclosure. A 2-bay setup will probably set you back about $500 or so, 2TB drives included (if you buy the drives separately from somewhere like NewEgg.) A 5-bay enclosure is about $900, without drives, to give you an idea of ballpark cost.

Needless to say, once people start seeing the costs involved, most turn their attention to single-drive external USB/FW/TB drive enclosures. They have their advantage in that a single drive is much more portable than a NAS enclosure ... but that's relative to the size of your library too. If it's too big to fit on a single drive, then you go out and buy a second single-drive enclosure, or start to manage multiple libraries, one per drive. Couple years down the line, you have three external drives, and you're only using the most recent/largest one, because it's too much of a pain to carry around multiple drives in your case ... true story.

With the money and time I've spent on external drives and building and maintaining DIY NAS systems made from left-over PC parts over the years, I was severely remiss in not getting a dedicated NAS unit sooner. Ah well ... that's what the benefit of hindsight gives us.

 

[Ploki]

I've switched to buying movies exclusively on iTunes and whoa what a surprise, it's taking up a bunch of space on my hard drive. Right now i have a 13 inch macbook pro with a 500 gig hard drive and after buying about 30 movies, i can see how storage space would be non existant by the time my little collection gets to something like 100 movies. This is a concern for when i switch to a retina macbook pro with a 500 gig hard drive. I don't want itunes taking up most of my precious itunes space!

So what should i do? Would it be better to keep my movies in the cloud instead of stored locally? Would that work? Or is there some way i could easily offload the itunes movies to an external hard drive for easy access later?

i think external drive is a good solution. you choose your default itunes folder to be external drive

 

[betman]

Keep in mind that for a number of countries you don't have to store & protect your itunes film collection because you can re-download any movie you like in the future.

Also, iTunes cans store different versions of stuff so you might have an SD, 720p and 1080p version of the same tv show for instance. Whereas it's easy to add versions in different resolutions (occasionally a 1080p version will use less space than a 720p one! - due to new encoding techniques I guess) it's a bit harder to remove them and leave just 1080p for instance.

Here's a must-read article about this:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/27457/

 

[utekineir]

Take the $500 you are going to spend on the ssd upgrade, buy a mac mini with it, run it as a plex server and itunes home sharing with your movie collection. My i7 mini idles at <15 watts (on a cheap harbor freight watt meter.)

and/or Store only select movies on your rmbp? sd slot drive expander?

 

[Rosenlicht]

I have all my media files on a external network drive. That way I can access music, movies, etc. from any of my computers and have a lot of storage.

 

[MikesGravity]

Here's what I do (works great if you actually buy your movies through iTunes).

Setup a library on an external drive... keep all your music and movies in that library on the external. Sign up for iTunes Match.

Match it.

Create a new library and load your iTunes match stuff. External is not necessary for this library and all your movies and music will be available to stream (and on an AppleTV if you have one without your computer even being on).

 

[bonbmdxman]

I was in the same situation as you when I went from my 2009 MBP to a 15" rMBP. I chose to store all of my movies and tv shows on an external just to have a physical copy of my own. I didn't want to point my library to the external b/c I don't want to rely on keeping my external plugged in to use iTunes for music. So i only have my music on my rMBP and for normal video watching circumstances, I just stream from the cloud via my AppleTV.

 

[Arcsylver]

I solved this problem by setting up an external USB drive on my Airport extreme. All 3 of my macs as well as my Partners windows machine can now share my entire library.

No need to keep it plugged into the rMBP this way.