Not entirely a hardware question, but related so…

Having ditched the idea of upgrading my 2006 Intel iMac’s HDD, I’m going to add another FW external, probably 1TB.

I’m running out of room so I need to move either my 47GB iTunes collection or 68GB of photos. The question is which will affect performance the most, ie will moving the music affect iTunes more or less than moving the photos affects iPhoto?

I guess the affect would be similar...

It's a toss up, I think moving the iTunes music would be better, being accessed a lot it might not have great performance, but file sizes are smaller.
iPhoto would (I presume) be used less, but the files are likely to be a lot bigger than a music file? Which would lead to longer loading times when flicking through photos which I think would be more noticeable...

I have my photo collection on an external FW drive and while there's no huge problem, iPhoto does seem to take longer to deal with things. However, I guess it's a case of which is likely to grow more rapidly: your photos or your music? My photo collection has vastly outgrown my music in a very short time, so despite any loss of performance from using an external drive, you may find you need to move your images "offsite" anyway.

You’d think so, but my images are generally smaller. As a test I looked at the last pic I took, a 3072x2048 JPEG, which is 3.5MB. The last music I ripped (256 AAC), file sizes vary between 5 and 10MB.



They seem to be growing at a similar rate so at some stage I’ll probably end up moving both of them.

Having thought about it some more and taking your thoughts into consideration, I think it’s Pickfords for the pics. I use iTunes for as much as 12 hours a day so I think that’s the decisive factor. Thanks.

PS. rubicon, do we know you by another name from the other place?

Possibly. I thought I'd create a new persona for this venture. I'll still be spending the bulk of my time over at t'other place when it relaunches as there was a very strong Mac community there before and I'd like to support that. I'm sure I'll stick my head in here as well to see if I can offer any Mac insight to those who didn't make the jump back from beyond the red line. (They probably won't be very useful insights, but I'll give it a go.)

EDIT: I've just discovered this site's ability to ignore people. Good lord that's a nice touch! Something the original site could do well to implement, not that there's any need now that the forums will be split.