Please can you give me the benefit of your experiences.  I have a mac mini and the hard drive is now becoming full, mainly with photographs.  I am now looking for and external hard drive to work in conjunction with the mac mini.  It will be located out of site so appearance is not of particular importance.  I thought that 500GB would be sufficiently large enough.  So I am looking for a reliable external hard drive,  Has anyone got any suggestions of which make and model would be suitable, or other advice, ideas?

My second question is that as mentioned it will be mainly for storing my photographs on, is it easy or possible to make iphoto look to the external drive for my photos rather than the mac mini's hard drive so that when I open iphoto the pictures on my new external hard drive will be displayed automatically.  I hope that i have explained this clearly enough?

Many thanks in anticipation for any contribution you can make

Peter G.

Recently I purchased a 250GB External Hard Drive made by Freecom. They do a 500GB Drive designed for use with a MAC. Here is a link for you.

500GB Mac Hard Drive

Sorry as I don't have any experience with Macs I cannot answer you second question.

Craig

I have just bought a Western Digital MyBook 500Gb with USB2 and Firewire 400 ports. It's connected to an old G3 iBook that I use as a media centre. The MyBook sits vertically on a bookshelf and does not look like a hard drive at all (though it has an annoying blue disco light on the front that I sorely wish was absent). It is not particularly noisy and it inaudible when I have music turned up!

You can move your iTunes library using the instructions on the Apple Web site. Moving your iPhoto library is even easier.

As an alternative to DVDpedia have a look at Delicious Library.

For a Mac Mini, get one of these

I have a stand-alone server, ReadyNAS+ from Infrant, with 4x500GB harddisks in it. It's a very reliable and yet inexpensive server. You'd be surprised at how cheap storage has become. With the ReadyNAS+ you can add harddisks as you need them, starting with 1.

You can have a long Firewire cable to your server, Coolskin. And put it somewhere you won't hear it. I have my server in another room. The quieter the servers, the more expensive they tend to be, as the cooling needs to be more sophisticated. You can also consider replacing the fan with a more quiet running one yourself. 

I'd agree - I've three of these drives now, a 250MB USB2, 250MB Firewire & USB and, recently, a 500MB Firewire 800, Firewire 400 and USB 2. I can connect this direct to my iMac and use up the otherwise unconnected fast Firewire. I've had the smaller pair now for some time and they've worked perfectly; the 250MB is now being prepped to be my Time Machine drive when Leopard arrives. 

By the way, I believe Western Digital have produced a version 2 of these discs now, with capacities up to 2TB. They are distinguished by the vertical (rather than circular) indicator lights on the 'spine' of the book.

hope that's useful 

Maybe this one

or this one 

Britops has provided a link that describes in detail what should happen. You are right in thinking that you have copied your iPhoto library and thus you must delete the old one once you are happy that the new library is both complete and in your preferred location.

Do not be concerned about your lack of knowledge. Time and experience will solve that for you. You should also feel free to post questions to Beoworld and other forums. We all come here to learn and help each other.

Enjoy your Mac Mini and your new MyBook hard drive. See how long it takes for you to fill it!
 

PeterG:

I know I will kick myself but what is the option key on the key board.

Britpop:

The new keyboards had the word "option" on. I've had Mac's for many years and still never use the option key.  

 

 

OT, but for years the Apple forum has helped me. Just wondered if you or any new Mac users have tried it?

MacRumors is better as there's no 'company restrictions' like on the Apple forum, and it's actually kinda like a larger version of BeoWorld (except there are quite often issues with flamers and trolls but the mods do a pretty good job).

I've got one of the Lacie Porsche design ones, portable 100 gb drive with Firewire and USB. Runs without any extra cables - very useful!

I've also got a massive (and ugly) 750 gb Maxtor drive. £120, Firewire 400 (and chaining connection), 7200 rpm and pretty darn quiet. Sits under my desk so I never see it.

I ALSO have an older 250 gb WD MyBook (original black one), USB only and a bit slow/noisy at times.

Last but not least, my 250 gb Lacie drive, from when 250 gb was the absolute most you could get! Very very noisy, very big, very heavy and very, very slow.

do you post at macrumors too ?

good site that , macnn and appleinsider are exc as well

ars technica is supposed to be the ultimate but they spend all day chatting about the vagaries of cpu optimization , not exactly my cup of tea 

Yep, I do indeed, although not as much as I used to. There was a time when I was averaging 40 posts a day, but now it's closer to five or six.