Can I run everything from an external hard drive?

[hugh1988]

Hi, my current eMac is really playing up, so I want to get a new mac mini. But the mac mini's biggest hard-disk is only 120GB so I want to get a firewire external drive of 400GB and buy the mac mini with the smallest/cheapest hard-drive. This would mean I do not have enough space on the internal drive for all my music, and photos, which need to be run off the internal drive.

Is there any way in which I can access all my music from iTunes, with it saved to the external drive, as well as importing music to it? I'm not too sure having an alias of the music folder in my users with all the music on the external drive will work.

Basically, knowing how to completely running the computer from the external drive would be perfect.

Would really appreciate any advice. Thanks!

[Mikuro]

Yes, this is very easy. Using an alias for your iTunes Music folder would NOT work, but a symbolic link would. But you don't even need to do that, since you can specify the location of your music folder in iTunes' preferences. No problem at all. I do this myself, actually. I keep very little on my boot drive.

You could also boot straight from the external drive with no problem. Just install OS X onto it from the DVD and set it as the startup disk in the "Startup Disk" section of System Preferences. The Mini's internal SATA drive would be faster than a FireWire drive (I think), so you might want to use it for disk-intensive things like multimedia work.

[eric2006]

You could install OS X on the external drive, and use the internal drive as a backup system.

[hugh1988]

omg, i'm so stupid for not realising that in the preferences... how embarrasing! Thanks a lot for the help

[dmetzcher]

Others have pointed you to the preference in iTunes for running it from an external drive, so I'll just say that I keep my library on an external FW drive, and I used to keep most everything on that drive, prior to upgrading the drive in my iBook, including iPhoto. Everything runs great, too.

You can still drop aliases to the location on the external drive in your user folder, so it all works logically when you want to get to the exact location of the iTunes folder on the external drive.

[shelbydodgeimp]

You could also boot straight from the external drive with no problem

But the external drive must be firewire or SCSI (if you machine is that old) to boot from the external drive, correct me if I am wrong but I believe macs have never had the ability to boot off of usb (firewire is better anyway in all honesty).

[bobw]

Beginning with the Power Mac G4 (AGP Graphics) and the iMac (Slot-Loading), two new features to USB are most apparent: support for USB audio devices and booting from USB drive

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58430

[hugh1988]

Thanks all for the help. Yes the drive is firewire, and I think I will install the OS on it and use it as the start up disk. does this mean all the apps and library etc. will be on the external drive too? I hope this wont be a problem.