How to manage a big itunes library?

Jwynacht - It's a sound strategy, yes. USB should be just fine as streaming music is not demanding of a fast interface. It will not be any problem at all in that respect. It will slow things down when you start copying large amounts of files from one drive to another since the interface is comparatively slow. The other disadvantage may be in using a 'green' drive, with no cooling fan, your drive life will likely be shortened as heat is an enemy of drive life. Still, those drives are certainly the most quiet (quiet as a church mouse) and I use them myself (Lacie 500 gig version of basically the same thing). Yes, iTunes can look at as many drives as you care to store your library on. In turn you can consolidate your library onto one large drive with just that command: "Consolidate Library" - in this case iTunes will COPY all of your music files to whichever hard drive is currently pointed to as the main library. It will leave all the original files in tact on whatever drive they were originally on. You, of course, need to have enough space on the drive you point it at to store all those files. Here is a case where a USB interface would seriously bog things down with a large library. As long as you can walk away from it you'll be fine, but if you plan to hang around and wait, you better get a good book.

OK, so I am going to get the WD mybook, the one with the firewire connection. I will just keep all my Lacie drives for now as backup. I have ripped my collection and as each drive filled up have gone to the next one. I have a total of 5 250gb drives and one 500 now filled so I will have a little room to grow and will be backed up with all the Lacie drives I have now, besides they aren't worth crap anyway so I might just as well save them for my backup. If the WD drive is nice I'll get another one and use it for new rips and backing up new rips.

It has a 5 year warranty so they must be somewhat sure that it will last.

If you are running USB out of your Mac Mini to the Paradisea, you may hear an improvement if your storage is connected via Firewire rather than USB. At least that's what some people claim.

And speaking of storage, good articles to read here:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/1716207

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/2126252

Yeah I'm getting the firewire version.