Hard Drive Usage

Hi Everyone,

I bought my first Macbook Pro 13" last year and love it, much better than any Windows based computer have had in the past, but recently I have been struggling for hard drive space. I tend to watch a lot of films and TV shows on it, which I have been keeping on a external hard drive because 320Gb on the Macbook isn't enough, but this restricts where I can take my mac and watch stuff.

Should I upgrade my hard drive a bigger one?
If so what should I be looking for?
Or is there another of watching media throughout my house without keeping it on my Macbook?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

You could upgrade to a larger one, but really I think the secret is to delete (or archive to the external) the media stuff after you're done watching it.

Getting a bigger hard drive may help, in fact I'm sure it would -- but only temporarily, because it too will eventually fill up. The real secret is learning how to manage your media better.

Another thought: you might want to explore the possibility of a "personal cloud" type drive (basically an NAS drive with fileserver/login ability), something like PogoPlug et al.

chas_m said:

You could upgrade to a larger one, but really I think the secret is to delete (or archive to the external) the media stuff after you're done watching it.

Getting a bigger hard drive may help, in fact I'm sure it would -- but only temporarily, because it too will eventually fill up. The real secret is learning how to manage your media better.

Another thought: you might want to explore the possibility of a "personal cloud" type drive (basically an NAS drive with fileserver/login ability), something like PogoPlug et al.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice. I do try to archive stuff I don't use on my external hard drive, the only problem I have is most of the stuff is stuff for my son to watch and he watches them over and over again.

Pogoplug sounds interesting never heard of it before, so will definately be looking into that some more. Who are Pogoplugs competitors?

Just about every hard drive manufacturer out there. They all offer cloud-enabled NAS drives these days.

One option is to use an external hard drive for a second iTunes folder. All you have to do is hold Alt when opening iTunes and you have the option of starting a new iTunes folder which can be on a different drive. Once you have the new folder you can choose whether to use the internal or external iTunes folder by pressing Alt when you open it. If you don't press Alt iTiunes just goes to the last one opened.

I use this method as I sometimes use my MacBook Pro, sometimes my iMac and sometimes my MacBook Air. As I can only use one at a time it is pointless having to keep all three iTunes folders up to date so I have one iTunes folder on a 500Gbyte USB drive and just plug that in to whatever computer I am using. The drive is tiny, weighs nothing and does not need a power supply so it is no big deal to carry that around as well as the MacBook.

I still have a basic iTunes folder on each computer but its is pointless clogging up the internal drives with loads of space hogging films and doing it this way avoids having to keep moving items from an archive.