mac mini and external drives

Hi beoworlders

Those of you with a mac mini and use it as a server for your B&O setups, how do you go about when the hard drive is maxed out?

Can you use external USB hard drives and does the B&O setup pick it up?

I have the Avant and the Moment in mind.

Thanks in advance

MH

Hi Michael,

I don't use a B&O master with my Mac mini the way I assume you do (Moment reading the iTunes library?), but you should be able to do one of these two things:

- If your iTunes library and media are on the mini's main drive (Macintosh HD) you should be able to go into iTunes preferences and move the library to your new larger off board HD.

- If your iTunes library and media are on an external HD (my situation) you can clone the HD to a new larger HD then use that instead. I use Carbon Copy Cloner, which comes with a free 30 day trial, but you could use Super Duper or any of the acknowledged Mac cloning tools out there. You will need to hold down the Option key while clicking on iTunes next time and choose the new library location. Then I imagine that you would need to point the Moment at the new location, but I have no experience with it.

Hope this is of some use.

Lawrence

Hi Michael

I would not follow the road of a USB drive but use the thunderbolt option. If you need workstation performance, USB is no substitute to it and in my experience the Moment need that performance.

With now investigating the new Mac mini with USB 3 its adding another question to what drive you need. In the case of buying a new mini I would consider a usb drive to use as its comparable to the old Thunderbolt standard. There is a downside on it, USB 3.0 availability is spotty. Drives drop off for no reason and it takes unplugging and re-plugging to get it working again.

So what would I choose... The secure way off course. Paying more money, but being sure my Moment or Avant gets what it deserves, a good, speedy and reliable external HD drive. I choose a Thunderbolt quality disk from G-Technology. The G-Dock type with two swappable drives is my favorite, use raid on them and you have also a great backup for all your valued music files. My two cents.

My MacMini has the iTunes metadata on its hard drive and the tracks on an external USB drive

Both the internal and external dives are backed up to two time capsules

Thank you Chris 

Appreciate your $0.02.  I'll take a look at the G Technology drives.

 

Cheers