Itunes and my External Drive

[Edmonton]

I have had itunes on my external drive for a month and everything up until now worked great. I upgraded from 10.3.9 yesterday and now I'm at 10.4.7.

Since my upgrade everything works, except my itunes.

I have a USB hard drive (2.0), 7200 rpm, 250 Gigs, with about 30-35 gigs of music
and my mac is a G5 with 768 MB DDR SDRAM

now when I play my music on my itunes, it pauses (as if the USB drive itself can not send the data quick enough for itunes to read it.

To solve the problem I turned off spotlight from indexing my drives, (it was never indexing the usb to start with but i still made sure by entering the command) sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/drivename

I have searched and most people talk only about increasing the buffer (but I take it that is just for networking purposes).

Also, when the songs are playing, and it pauses, I cannot quickly change the song to another, itunes itself freezes up and after about 2-5 seconds starts up. The freeze happens ever 45-90 seconds.

I wish I could increase the buffer size for files from my USB drive, if so please explain how (my current setting on the advance tab is on large in case it solved the problem).

 

[eric2006]

It's possible that the USB drive is just not fast enough to provide enough speed for a 30 gig iTunes library. Even though USB 2 is in theory 480 mb/s, it usually won't go that fast. Your high-speed drive is greatly bottlenecked by the USB connection. A FW 400 drive would probably work fine, but if you have a PowerMac, a FW 800 drive would be best.