Hard Drive Space

[mattfromcanada]

This may not be directly an AppleTV question, but it's related.

I've been given AppleTV as a birthday gift (my wife is awesome) and I already anticipate the problem of hard drive space. My iMac currently has 74 gb remaining hard drive space of a 1 tb. Almost 750gb of that total is iTunes media, specificially TV shows and movies. Now once I get going on my media conversion, I will quickly surpass the available HD space on my mac, which means I'm going to have to go external.

Already away from AppleTV sorry....

I haven't researched external hard drives too in depth beyond the point of realising that I can get a 2 TB external for about $125. I will very quickly pass the 2 TB mark, so I'd be more comfortable with a 4TB. Can I link the two together to create a 4 TB?

I know that iTunes has the auto sort option which I love b/c then my file folders are easy to navigate when I need to. Can I split where all the files go, so my iTunes library file is still on my iMac, but the data is on different locations (ie Simpsons on drive A, Seinfeld on drive B). So if I had a 4 TB hard drive it could auto sort to that one location, but if I had it all on 2 different drives, I couldn't auto sort.

Hopefully someone else has already questioned this and can just point me to a thread.

Thanks

 

[mattfromcanada]

I'm just looking at iTunes preferences now....

"Keep iTunes Media Folder Organized"

pretty self explainatory....

"Copy Files To iTunes Media Folder"....

Is this where I want to focus?

Lets say I keep my music on my computer. I have all my videos stored externally...

I then uncheck "copy files to itunes media folder"

When I click add files to library, and select say Friends Season 1....

Friends Season 1 is then added to iTunes in the browsing sense, but the file remains on the external harddrive where it is accessed when I play it?

What happens when I download from the iTunes store? Are those files stored in my iTunes library, in which case the "copy files to itunes media folder" only applies to content I add (either ripping cd or video file I've ripped)?

If that's the case then I don't need to link the hard drives together, I will simply have video on an external until it fills up and then I just add another drive....perhaps by then they WILL have 4 tb!

 

[From A Buick 8]

I use a FireWire dual bay ext hd case from OWC. I installed two 2TB drives in it. The mount on my iMac as 1 4TB drive. I keep all of my iTunes files on there. So far I have about 450 movies and about 20 seasons of TV shows.

 

[waw74]

if you use the keep organized option, all of your media will be in the same folder. so no to your simpsons:a seinfeld:B question.

if you add something to your library, and keep organized is off, the files will stay where they are, and your library will point to that location.

purchased items will be filed in the location set in the advanced settings in iTunes.

one trick i've learned is to replace the "iTunes Media" folder with an alias that points to correct location. so you could copy (in finder) the iTunes media folder to your new external drive, and then make an alias to the new location, and place it in your iTunes folder. this will save you from having to rebuild your library.

You'll probably need a RAID of some sort, like the other poster mentioned. I use a droboFS, not cheap, but with 5 @ 2TB drives, it gives me 8TB storage with protection from a single drive failure.

you can RAID disks from OSX, so plug in 2@2TB external drives, and have them show up in OSX as a single 4TB drive.you'll want to look into the pros and cons of doing this though, as one drive failing will cause you to loose all of the data.

 

[balamw]

Can I split where all the files go, so my iTunes library file is still on my iMac, but the data is on different locations (ie Simpsons on drive A, Seinfeld on drive B). So if I had a 4 TB hard drive it could auto sort to that one location, but if I had it all on 2 different drives, I couldn't auto sort.

Hopefully someone else has already questioned this and can just point me to a thread.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1073408/

Turn off Keep Organized and Copy to iTunes Media Folder and you can spread your media around as you like.

I've had trouble with iTunes honoring Aliases myself as I tried using Aliases within my iTunes Media folder to get TV Shows on an external while keeping music on an internal.

B