What's normal for Hard Disk Space use?

[Gilvisto]

Yeah, I was wondering about that too. How do you manage your media on your external hard drive?
-Gil

 

[McDughf]

...The question I have is if I kept them stricly on the external hard drive would I beable to listen to them in iTunes on my MacBook? Would i beable to sync them to my iPhone without needing them on my computer?

You can tell iTunes exactly where you want to store your music in the system preferences, be it on internal or external drive. You could even use a networked drive or wireless remote disc. Just Make Sure To Check The Box That Says "Copy All Music To iTunes Folder".
After This, consolidate your music library so that all the files are then copied to the place you specified ( iTunes Menu: Advanced->Consolidate Library ).

Barney

 

[Gilvisto]

Thanks!

Can you keep split it up though? For instance, I'd like to have my music on my laptop, but my movies on the external... I suppose I could just have my entire itunes library on the external and then just copy my music back to my laptop... Anyways, any advice in that regard?

 

[balk]

Hi Gil, for your convenience, here is a size distribution of my MB:

MacBookSB:~ sander$ sudo du -h -d=1 /*
3.9G	/Applications
4.0K	/Desktop DB
4.0K	/Desktop DF
2.4G	/Developer
4.5G	/Library
  0B	/Network
3.8G	/System
4.0K	/User Guides And Information
120G	/Users
9.1M	/bin
  0B	/cores
2.0K	/dev
 10M	/efi
4.0K	/etc
1.0K	/home
9.8M	/mach_kernel
 10M	/mach_kernel.ctfsys
1.0K	/net
983M	/opt
2.5G	/private
5.2M	/sbin
4.0K	/tmp
1.3G	/usr
4.0K	/var

You can get this for your own drive by opening Terminal.app and issuing the command

sudo du -h -d=1 /*

sudo gives you superuser rights, du reports the size of a dir or file, -h makes it report in more human numbers (GB instead of Bytes), -d=1 makes it report no deeper than 1 dir deep and /* specifies to look in all dirs in your system root.

As you can see, my /Applications folder eats some 4GB and my guess is that that is rather average. My personal data is hidden in /Users hence the size of it. I think I need to start cleaning it up