Best way to avoid using hard drive for music?

[yoricardo]

Hi I have lots of live concerts that were officially released by the artist (via Nugs) and bought as mp3s. These are artist sanctioned but not released on Apple Music/Spotify.

I have just bought a new MBA and didn't want to store all the gigs on it as I don't want use up all my hard drive space as I've only got 250GB.

I would ideally like to store all the music files on my 2TB iCloud Drive and for the Music app to take the music from iCloud when I'm online. However, when I tried doing this, it seems that it makes a copy of any songs on the hard drive so it rather defeats the object. Has anyone got a solution to this or a better idea?

Thanks!

 

[HDFan]

You could move your library to an external drive. If you care about the concerts make sure you have a 3-2-1 backup strategy in place. iCloud doesn't count.

 

[James_C]

People understandably get confused with iCloud. Primarily it is a way to Sync files between Apple devices, not really a Cloud storage service, as it keeps a local copy of your files on your Mac (with a few exceptions with Photo’s that you can set to keep Hi-Res originals on iCloud, and the option to offload old files to iCloud if your disk gets full).

If you have more than one Mac, then you could have all your original music files on a Mac and use Apples music match service to keep them in the cloud and stream or download them to Other devices.

To be honest as @HDFan suggests the easiest way is to archive them to an external drive or NAS and either play them from there or transfer them to your Mac as needed.

 

[TightLines]

Hi I have lots of live concerts that were officially released by the artist (via Nugs) and bought as mp3s. These are artist sanctioned but not released on Apple Music/Spotify.

I have just bought a new MBA and didn't want to store all the gigs on it as I don't want use up all my hard drive space as I've only got 250GB.

I would ideally like to store all the music files on my 2TB iCloud Drive and for the Music app to take the music from iCloud when I'm online. However, when I tried doing this, it seems that it makes a copy of any songs on the hard drive so it rather defeats the object. Has anyone got a solution to this or a better idea?

Thanks!

Spend some money up front and create what is essentially your own cloud and get a decent NAS setup… that will serve many purposes, such as multi device backup with redundancy, access to data from multiple devices simultaneously, and even act as a multi media server using a product such as PLEX… this can be expensive on the front end but well worth it as piece of mind for your data security. Plan for the future needs, not just todays, and make it scalable as possible, and you should be set for years to come…

 

[MajorFubar]

Copy them to an external drive.
Make sure the option in iTunes/Music is set to NOT copy files across when you add new music to the Library.
Drag them into your Library, which should also initiate an iCloud sync, if you are already signed in.
After they've finished uploading, highlight them all and select Remove Download.

 

[Fishrrman]

Get an external SSD and put the files onto it.

But a warning:
Now you need A SECOND DRIVE to back up the first one.
Otherwise, the files could be gone in a flash!

 

[yoricardo]

All great suggestions, many thx all!

 

[HDFan]

Get an external SSD and put the files onto it.

An external SSD for media isn't a great idea except in special cases.

1. You normally don't need the speed
2. Reliability can be worse than a hard disk depending on how configured
3. Cost/GB ratio is poor compared to a HD

 

[Ifti]

Spend some money up front and create what is essentially your own cloud and get a decent NAS setup… that will serve many purposes, such as multi device backup with redundancy, access to data from multiple devices simultaneously, and even act as a multi media server using a product such as PLEX… this can be expensive on the front end but well worth it as piece of mind for your data security. Plan for the future needs, not just todays, and make it scalable as possible, and you should be set for years to come…

^ This ^

 

[James_C]

An external SSD for media isn't a great idea except in special cases.

1. You normally don't need the speed
2. Reliability can be worse than a hard disk depending on how configured
3. Cost/GB ratio is poor compared to a HD

Personally I think this is a little misleading.

1. You normally don't need the speed - For steaming music files you are probably correct, but when it comes to transferring large files between devices then the additional speed of an SSD is helpful.

2. Reliability can be worse than a hard disk depending on how configured.

To be honest this is (with a few exceptions) no longer true, provided you choose an SSD rated for its intended use. Even Backblaze (a cloud backup company) uses some SSD's in its backup centres and did a reliability test which they state "SSDs can be expected to last as long or longer than HDDs in most general applications".

Most people refer to the fact that SSD's have a finite amount of write cycles, in the early days of SSD's this was a problem, these days SSD's will generally outlast most computers that they are used in.

3. Cost/GB ratio is poor compared to a HD. Agreed, although SSD's are a lot less expensive than they used to be. The gap is closing.

 

[lostPod]

I have all my music that Apple does not have in my cloud using Music Match. I also am grandfathered into google play music so I can upload any files I want to Youtibe Muisc. I also store a second copy of all my rare files in Dropbox.

I also have two external HDDs that I store everything on too. Kind of overkill but at least I have backup plans lol. Pun intended

 

[HDFan]

Backblaze (a cloud backup company) uses some SSD's in its backup centres and did a reliability test which they state "SSDs can be expected to last as long or longer than HDDs in most general applications".

Backblaze just recently started using SSDs and in their reports they note that it will be a few years before they can have confidence in a comparision. It is coming - just not yet.

Prices will come down but a high performance 16 TB SSD runs in the thousands. The price of a 16 TB HD has almost halved to ~$270.

I suppose I'm just giving a knee jerk reaction to the simplistic stock answer for these questions which is almost always "get an SSD". SSDs are the future, but right now it is still best to evaluate the pros/cons. An SSD is the preferred answer if it is going to be used as the boot device. When used for data storage most of the time, as judged by the posts in these forums, it is not the answer.