iTunes on an external network hard drive

[Andybtsn]

Hi guys,

I am looking at buying an External Hard Drive that I can hook up to my network. I have a WD MyBook Network edition at present and it works great, just is a little small at only 500gb.
Anyway I have been looking around and see a lot of the drives are now displaying iTunes storage capabilites which leads me to my question, is storing all my music library on an external netwrok drive near as speedy as it would be on my actual PC?

I currently have two laptops, one that I play the music on, the other that sync's with my iPhone (I am unable to get my iPhone to work with Win7 for some reason)

As you can tell this is a little awkward when editing my library constantly. If I could store it on a network drive that would be an answer to my problems, I don't want it to be really slow though as of present my main library is held on one laptop and the other laptop shares it but it's very very slow.

Any ideas?

 

[GraemeUK]

I share my iTunes library on a network attached drive no problems at all. Not sure what all this advertising saying itll work is all about, because afaik its always worked.

It's not slow streaming music which is all I do. You might run in to problems streaming movies though.

Search google for some guides on moving itunes library to network drive (theres lots of them) and its pretty easy to do.

 

[Deleted member 651465]

I have my iTunes & iPhoto library stored on a Drobo Pro (NAS).

Never run in to speed problems, but then it's running on Gigabit Ethernet. I can't speak for a drive connected via USB.

 

[Andybtsn]

EVH, I bought a NAS drive and am currently moving my music over to it. The music can be seen in the Shared Lib in iTunes as it copies. Am I ok to sync my iPhone with this library?

 

[Deleted member 651465]

Why don't you just move the master iTunes folder (Home>Music>iTunes) to the NAS, then hold down option on the Mac when launching iTunes and point it to the new location on the NAS.

This is what I do for iTunes and iPhoto. This will keep your play counts and ratings etc..

You can then share that via your master machine / server, and all machines can access the library on the NAS providing the master machine / server is running.