Itunes Library on an external HDD on a network.

[amardilo]

I was looking at buying an external HDD to store all my iTunes CD rips and podcasts on (both audio and video).

Can I connect my external HDD to a router (currently I have a cheap BT router but I can buy a new one and I want to get a 500GB Western Digital My Book Pro) and then access my library from my windows and mac computers? Also could I rip CDs onto that HDD from all machines.

I want to connect it to a router as I only own laptops and don’t own a machine that is on all day everyday (I could leave them on all day but I have heard that it would destroy my battery).

 

[knightlie]

I use a LinkSys NSLU-2 for exactly this purpose - it's a network appliance which has USB ports for making USB hard disks available on the network. There's a Buffalo-something-or-other device which does the same thing.

 

[amardilo]

I use a LinkSys NSLU-2 for exactly this purpose - it's a network appliance which has USB ports for making USB hard disks available on the network. There's a Buffalo-something-or-other device which does the same thing.

To tell you the truth I do own a LinkSys NSLU-2. I bought it from Amazon a few months back. I could never get it to work with my old Maxtor external HDD (I think its a very very old One touch 200GB HDD) and my router. Maybe my router and HDD at the time were the problem. I might have to dig that thing out and give it another try.

I saw that the new airport extreme has a USB2 socket on it, would that work really easily?

Also I would want to update my iPod. Would having an external iPod library cause issues with updating my iPod?

 

[shane82388]

To tell you the truth I do own a LinkSys NSLU-2. I bought it from Amazon a few months back. I could never get it to work with my old Maxtor external HDD (I think its a very very old One touch 200GB HDD) and my router. Maybe my router and HDD at the time were the problem. I might have to dig that thing out and give it another try.

I saw that the new airport extreme has a USB2 socket on it, would that work really easily?

Also I would want to update my iPod. Would having an external iPod library cause issues with updating my iPod?

yeah this is a great idea. ive been wanting to find out of it would work for a long time but never got around to it...my MBP hard drive is only 120gb so it would be nice to have my music on a remote network hard drive instead of just taking up space on my main computer.