External firewire drive query

Chic0

Chic0

aka Norman Gah
Hi

I have a Powerbook G4 12" with one firewire port and am interested in buying an external Lacie hard drive to store all my itunes music on. I also have an iPod so need to have that connected via the firewire port when syncing with iTunes.

The Lacie external drive has two firewire ports on the on it. When having the external drive connected to the laptop, would I be able to connect the iPod into the external drive in order to sync it with iTunes? Any one know?
 
Yes, you can. And you can (at least I can with my Maxtor external) also disconnect from one while staying connected to the other (as long as the power remains on with the external).
But if you don't need the external hooked up all of the time, you can manually manage your iTunes collection and not have everything on your hard drive. Then you can have your music collection backed up to the external. I do it that way, but I have iBooks so I'm not always plugged into the external.
About every other month, I use PodUtil and copy all of my songs and Audible.com audiobooks to the external in case my iPod is ever lost or stolen. I have all of my music, and a good backup and I don't have to have the 20GB or so eating space on the hard drive.
 
Randman said:
Yes, you can. And you can (at least I can with my Maxtor external) also disconnect from one while staying connected to the other (as long as the power remains on with the external).
But if you don't need the external hooked up all of the time, you can manually manage your iTunes collection and not have everything on your hard drive. Then you can have your music collection backed up to the external. I do it that way, but I have iBooks so I'm not always plugged into the external.
About every other month, I use PodUtil and copy all of my songs and Audible.com audiobooks to the external in case my iPod is ever lost or stolen. I have all of my music, and a good backup and I don't have to have the 20GB or so eating space on the hard drive.
Click to expand...

Cheers for the reply. I have been looking at the Lacie drives. Does anyone know the best place to buy it on the internet for UK. The best I have seen so far is the Lacie 160gb Firewire 400 external drive for £113.
 
Sounds like a good price to me... be sure to stay away from their "F.A. Porche" designs. People have reported problems with them (both on this site and other sites) and I'm a little leery of them as well.
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
Sounds like a good price to me... be sure to stay away from their "F.A. Porche" designs. People have reported problems with them (both on this site and other sites) and I'm a little leery of them as well.
Click to expand...

That's the exact drive I was going for. One of my mates bought one a few months ago to store all his iTunes music on. When he first tried copying over the library the drive wouldn't accept any filenames with symbols such as '?' or '!'. He then had to go through all the files and edit them all removing these symbols, then go into iTunes and repair the file links. Only after doing all this was he able to copy the itunes music over to the external drive.

Has anybody else had this trouble with copying over music to external drives or is this just a problem with the Porsche drives?
 
Did your friend re-format the drive as HFS+ after getting it? It sounds like the drive may have shipped in FAT format (or some format other than HFS+), and may not play nicely with certain characters in filenames ("?", "/", ";", etc.).
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
Did your friend re-format the drive as HFS+ after getting it? It sounds like the drive may have shipped in FAT format (or some format other than HFS+), and may not play nicely with certain characters in filenames ("?", "/", ";", etc.).
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if he did format it but I'll find out. I never knew the Porsche drives were known to have a lot of problems.

Thanks for the help
 
The latest version of PodUtil (which went from freeware to shareware) fixes the problems and it now reads foreign characters perfectly.
 
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