Is an Internal or an External Drive Best For iTunes Playback?

January 23, 2012 1:54 PM

Is there any reason why I shouldn't transfer my 200+ GB iTunes library from an external drive to the internal drive of my new MacBook Pro?

I've had my 200+ GB iTunes library on various external drives for years, but my brand new MacBook Pro has more hard drive space than I know what to do with (750 GB total). Is there any reason why I shouldn't transfer the library to the internal drive?

Of course I will keep the external as a back-up, that's not part of the question. I just like the idea of accessing/playing the library from the machine and not having the external drive constantly plugged in and running. If it makes any difference, the external drive is a LaCie "rugged" drive, 250 GB, a few years old. The computer is a 13" MacBook Pro with 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3, and a 750GB hard drive.

posted by eric1halfb to computers & internet (9 answers total)

I can't think of a reason not to, assuming as you said that you keep a backup, and assuming you won't need a ton of disc space on the computer for something else soon.

In spite of all the fancy "cloud" solutions, I have always been happiest when I have all my music right there on my computer, playable whether I'm online or not.
posted by drjimmy11 at 1:58 PM on January 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

I have a 1.25 GB itunes library on my macbook and I've never had any problems. I've been really happy with the setup.

I am moving to a Macbook Air in a couple weeks and am considering the opposite - moving half my itunes library to an external drive.

I don't think you'll have any problems.
posted by kdern at 2:28 PM on January 23, 2012

I did this exact same thing recently with a rather large library (90 GB) of mostly music. I followed the official Apple support document for this procedure, which is found here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449

Only caveat is that I noticed some random files did not get copied over, so I was glad I didn't erase the external drive when I was done. Someone far smarter than me posted a tutorial for making smart playlists that would identify the missing tracks between two libraries, but I can't track it down at the moment.

In short, I haven't been happier. No need to make sure I have the external disc mounted anymore just to listen to some music.
posted by teriyaki_tornado at 2:30 PM on January 23, 2012

No reason not to until you need the space.
posted by StUdIoGeEk at 3:02 PM on January 23, 2012

Which one has higher RPM? Asking because my MBP hard drive operates at 5400 RPM, whereas my USB 2.0 external hard drive operates at 7200 RPM. That being said, backups are nice, so do what you must.
posted by oceanjesse at 3:25 PM on January 23, 2012

Put the 'master' library on your laptop's internal HDD and use time machine to back it up (or periodically rsync the contents of your entire laptop HDD to the external as a backup).

For example, I have a laptop running OSX which has an 80GB SSD as the boot drive, and a 750GB as the data storage drive. I have a home linux server running samba on the same 1Gbps LAN subnet, with multi-TB of empty space to receive backups:

backup home dir from boot drive:
rsync -avh --progress --delete --ignore-errors ~/* myusername@myhomeSMBserver:/backups/backup.macbookpro17/myusername/

backup data 750GB drive
rsync -avh --progress --delete --ignore-errors /Volumes/data/* myusername@myhomeSMBserver:/backups/backup.macbookpro17/data/
posted by thewalrus at 3:32 PM on January 23, 2012

Hard drive performance is absolutely not an issue in this application; any hard disk can supply data at speeds well over those necessary for smooth audio playback. I have a collection of MP4 videos stored on memory cards that I connect to my ancient laptop via USB1 (yes, one) with no problems at all, and video demands far more storage bandwidth than even uncompressed CD-quality audio.
posted by flabdablet at 7:13 PM on January 23, 2012

Which one has higher RPM? Asking because my MBP hard drive operates at 5400 RPM, whereas my USB 2.0 external hard drive operates at 7200 RPM. That being said, backups are nice, so do what you must.

Any USB 2.0 HDD, no matter its physical spinning speed, will generally max out at about 35MB/s sequential file reads or writes. This is a bottleneck of the USB 2.0 interface.

Modern 500GB to 750GB 5400 rpm 2.5" laptop hard drives on SATA300 buses will do sequential reads or writes in the 65MB to 90MB/second range, consistently thoughout the full range of the disk (Except in the case of a very badly fragmented NTFS disk), which is muchfaster than USB 2.0.
posted by thewalrus at 7:41 PM on January 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

Sounds like there's no reason not to try.

Hey, thewalrus. What about firewire? I started using firewire drives back in the days before USB 2.0 and never gave up on them. I'm assuming that they're also slower than the average laptop hard drive, as you've suggested about USB 2.0 drives, but are they also slower than the current generation of USB drives? Am I prejudiced towards my old reliable favorite?
posted by eric1halfb at 9:46 AM on January 24, 2012