Running iTunes Library from external USB HD

D

dbizzle

Registered
Ok. Here it goes. I bought an 80 gig 2inch laptop hardrive, got an external case for it, and it is mounted to my ibook via USB2.0. I formatted it with Fat32 (so i could use it ony my windows and mac). I have 30 gigs worth of songs that I am running straight off of the perpetually connected hard drive to to save space on my laptop. I have itunes setup so that it points to my external hard drive as my library, and is set to manage the library and copy songs their. The problem is that it is very unstable. iTunes constantly freezes and will not even quit until i pull the plug on the hard drive, then everything goes back to normal. I guess my question is if anyone has any ideas on how to make my little setup a little more stable. I have tried reinstalling itunes, but of course it didnt do anything. I am unplugging my hard drive 5 or 6 times per day when it freezes. Would using a different hard drive format change anything? Thanks for all the help
 
Hmm, I do kind of the same thing and haven't had any problems.

I don't have my library on the external disk, I just turned off auto copy and imported all the songs, left the library at the default spot.
 
how did you format an 80gig drive fat32? it's called fat32 because it only supports up to 32gig. so that would be my first thought, its locking up because the partition table is unstable. the macs fat32 support isn't that great. to make it stable, format the drive for mac, and only use it there. or make 4 partitions all less then 32gig. i'm really surprised the mac even mounts it.
 
sinclair_tm said:
how did you format an 80gig drive fat32? it's called fat32 because it only supports up to 32gig. so that would be my first thought, its locking up because the partition table is unstable. the macs fat32 support isn't that great. to make it stable, format the drive for mac, and only use it there. or make 4 partitions all less then 32gig. i'm really surprised the mac even mounts it.
Click to expand...

You are incorrect sir, I don't know what the max is, but the 32 has nothing to do with the max size. I have a 250 GB external drive that I use between my mac and my PC that is formatted with Fat32. Not a problem here at all.
 
sinclair_tm said:
how did you format an 80gig drive fat32? it's called fat32 because it only supports up to 32gig.
Click to expand...
FAT32 is named "FAT32" because it uses a 32-bit addressable space... its predecessor is FAT16, which, as you probably guessed, uses a 16-bit addressable space.

The only correlation that FAT32 and 32GB have in common is that 32GB is the maximum size that Windows XP will let you format a FAT32 partition -- simply a limitation of Windows XP, and not of the FAT32 format. FAT32 can indeed be formatted beyond 32GB.
 
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