[santacore]

My iTunes library has just maxed out my 2TB drive. I'm currently shopping for a new drive to handle my ever growing collection. I guess the next step is a 3TB drive.

How are others that have collections this big handling the data storage? Do you just use 1 big drive? Do you partition your drives? I know iTunes is not the best with large music libraries. Any tips on optimizing my system? I'm currently running a Mac Mini and a single 2 TB Firewire 800 drive.

Thanks,

John

[rpf]

I started with a 2TB drive, went up to 3 and now am deciding whether to go to a 4 or 5 TB drive.    With an equivalent drive for backup.

I read somewhere (don't remember where or why) that it's better not to partition a drive for music (with iTunes?).

[charmerci]

I listen to music about 6 hours a day and a couple of days a week even more. I have well under 200 GB of music and every couple of weeks, I'll say I haven't heard any music from album x in a long time. (Granted I'm not always listening to my hd music.)


Does anyone have any time to listen to even one TB of music? 

[sts9fan]

I have ~3.6TB and I keep it on a Synology NAS.  I need top upgrade to a 4bay soon. 

[santacore]

charmerci, I hear ya. It's a ridiculous amount of music, but hey, options are always good. You never know when you'll have company over and they want to hear a certain something. Since disc space is relatively cheap, what would be the point of deleting anything? Considering my hard drive takes up as much space as a small stack of CD's or LP's, I think it's a win, win.

[jpm]

I have ~3.6TB and I keep it on a Synology NAS.  I need top upgrade to a 4bay soon.

I second the Synology option. I'm now on my 3rd one. 

My saga began out of frustration from having to recover music from corrupted hard drives. It takes far too long to reconstruct a library and so my first Synology unit was the DS409j.

The reason folks choose synology over other brands is their reputation for rock solid hardware and software. The software is very user friendly for beginners while not being dumbed down for very advanced functions if desired.

You'll find a lot of people over at Computer Audiophile use Synology units. My personal recommendation is:
- Spring for 4 bay model
- At least 3 drives installed to start with so you can enjoy RAID 5
- Buy the largest drives you can afford
- If you want to be able to store & stream video choose a model from the SMB / SOHO range
- install in a closet and forget about it

Mac owners can use it for time machine backups. Everyone can use the iTunes library, Squeeze Server and the cloud app's are super simple to set up so that you can access your music, photos, video from anywhere you have an internet connection. Lastly, back up to Amazon Glacier for pennies a month.

As an added bonus, if you decide to upgrade models later, you'll find you can easily recoup a surprisingly large chunk of your original investment reselling your old Synology unit on Amazon or eBay.

[jarcher]

I would also keep it all on one drive, and preferably a NAS w/ an additional drive(s) for back up.  This way all computers can share the library AND you have convenient back up.

That's where I'm heading eventually.  For the moment just a 1 TB portable drive on my mac mini, but recently got several TB's of DSD + Hi-Rez music (files take up a LOT of space), and will have to find a way to incorporate everything.   

[mcgsxr]

I have somewhere around 1.5TB of music these days.  I keep it all on 1 drive, and hang that drive off my dedicated netbook running LMS as the server.

I control it all using iPeng (recently popped for the new version that plays well on IOS7) and am happy.

I keep a backup 2TB drive in my office at work, and call it done.

If I find that other users want to connect to the library, or we want to centralize storage of all media, I agree that those Synology NAS are excellent.

[djcamilleon]

When I saw your post title, I was not thinking your were asking from the hardware/storage aspect rather than a software/management aspect. Then when I read your post, I was appalled and SCARED that you mention using iTunes to manage your now over 2TB music collection.

Though this may be off topic, I am an audiophile and iTunes is one of the most horrific pieces of software for managing music, let alone a collection that large. iTunes has it's place, as it is still one of the best softwares to manage your iPhone (which I do NOT have) and iPod Touch/iPod Classic (of which, I have both) music and app libraries. However, as a playback and library management software, I've tried EVERYTHING free AND paid for and nothing comes close to J. River Media Center. It's library management and playback format options alone are the top of the class. The fact that the software is less than $50 is just icing on the cake. I've been using it exclusively for the past 10+ years and you'd have to pry it out of my cold, rigor-mortised hands. To have watched it grow over time has been amazing and how many other softwares offer up-sampling to DSD128?! Even if up-sampling isn't your thing, JRMC has features and capabilities for everybody, no matter your level of competency or size of collection. The search functionality is superb and FAST: My music library has nearly 213,000 songs (no, that's NOT a typo) and I can search for ANYTHING and get results is microseconds. I'll say this: if they asked me to pay TEN TIMES the asking price, I would STILL gladly give them my money. It's THAT amazing and you owe it to yourself to check it out. Just a friendly word of advice from a fellow audiophile!

[yioryos]

Hi
I second the Jriver software. I just paid for my licence for Jriver and installed on my two mac computers plus on my son
Mac mini.
My music library is about 1 Tb but it is growing slowly. Jriver sounds superb ,it has tons of features ,the best gapless or cross fade playback that I have seen and a beautiful layout .
I tried other software before that but nothing came close with the exception of Fidelia that it sounded really nice about the equal of Jriver I think but very basic otherwise.
I also tried Vox , Clementine , XBMC , Itunes , Deibel , Fidelia , Plex , and few others that don,t remember the names now.
Also worth noting is that I got the 30 days free trial with Jriver and it run out before I had a chance to licence it ,so they extended the trial an extra 10 days on me , good people I say.

Best
George

[santacore]

While I agree with you that iTunes stinks for library handling, I kind of stuck with it because I love the sound of the Amarra playback engine. Audirvana+ is also excellent, so sometimes I switch back and forth.

I know jRiver is supposed to be great, but I don't know anyone personally that's running it on a Mac.

By the way-I kept it simple and just got a 3TB Thunderbolt external drive. That will keep me going for a while until I can figure out a better plan. Thanks to all for the input!

[Noseyears]

I have almost 2tb of music in my library and looking to upgrade soon. The Ikea/Nas diy project seems tempting, you have more flexibility.

[robcentola]

I have about a Tb on a laptop and 1.5 on an external drive. This I collected digitally over only the last 6 months or so and I'll be out of space in no time as I use the drive for movies too. I have the HD connected to my router, so it's like a small NAS server and works great, but it's very limited. I use Bubble UPnP to control and play from either library and send it to the Oppe BDP 103. It works flawlessly and it so darn convenient. I'm considering the new Auralic Aries to replace the streaming duties of the Oppo.

Now I'm seriously considering a NAS. I've been doing some research and I'm thinking Synology 214+. If anyone has any comment or suggestions I'd be grateful.

[srb]

If your use might include simultaneously streaming audio to one location and video to another location, I would consider a 4-bay unit to have dedicated drives for audio and video and the other drive(s) for backup.  Everyone I know (myself included) who has bought a 1 or 2-bay NAS, outgrew it relatively quickly and wished they had bought the 4-bay.

Steve

[jtwrace]

Everyone I know (myself included) who has bought a 1 or 2-bay NAS, outgrew it relatively quickly and wished they had bought the 4-bay.

Steve

Yep.

[

[mg8]

I use a single 2TB OWC Elite Pro Mini for the outboard music server and have larger OWC Eltite Pro 3TB+ drives as backups. I really like the Synology NAS solutions but I am trying to keep the library to a manageable size and don't wan toe switch to as NAS proposition now.  My criteria for adding new music keeps the growth in check.  The criteria:

1.  I have to have a long term expectation of listening to the album, more than once;
2.  Full albums only, no single song folders - compilations are usually dumped as well;
3.  Must be at least 16/44 quality;
4.  New purchases are 24/88 or 24/96 verses 24/176 or 24/192 unless a special situation exists;
5.  If I listen to it and it has a defect or lesser sound quality - it's out.

Otherwise, they can stay on a thumb drive or CD media.  I have a ton of CD's, 99% are on the main drive but the criteria above is applied to them as well.  I use Audrivanna (no iTunes GUI).  With a huge library, I don't think the album art pictures help the browsing and sorting.

[abernardi]

Hey John!  I've been struggling with the same issue.  I'm not real happy with my solution yet.  Currently I'm running a Mac-Mini with two 2TB Oyen 2.5" external FW drives (they were highly recommended by a fellow audiophile as the the ones to use, though I can't really see why as the songs load into memory b4 being played, but that's for another thread).  Then I have a 4TB backup drive that I backup to from time to time.  I probably should have done a software raid into one 4TB partition, but I never trusted raid 0 or JBOD's, call me superstitious.  Of course this way I run into a problem with iTunes seeing two drives separately. 
  The way I got around that was to point iTunes to the first drive, let's say "Media HDD 1" and click the two boxes to "Keep iTunes media..." and "Copy files to iTunes...".  When Music Library 1 is almost full I point iTunes to the other drive, let's call it "Media HDD 2" and UNCLICK the "Copy files to iTunes..." option. 
  Now it gets a little tricky.  I now have to remember to make sure I get those files onto Media HDD 2 before dragging or importing them into iTunes because iTunes won't do it for me anymore.  But once they're there and I drag them into iTunes, they will be organized as usual.  Also, you will end up with duplicate "Artist" folders if you have that artist on HDD 1 and then add more on HDD 2.  But functionally it's not a problem.  Then for backup I partitioned the 4TB drive into 2-2TB partitions and use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup the media drives.
  I've been sticking with iTunes for now because I use Audirvana.  But frankly, I hate the interface, especially since the last major update, it's so damn limiting.  I used to be able to find a view that was fast and efficient for sorting and info.  Now I have to switch between Album, artist and song views to get what I want.  It's very cumbersome.  I actually find it simpler to do away with the iTunes front end all together and just use Audirvana's file system which is primitive but fast and simple.
  J River sounds like a good alternative, but I've heard conflicting reports on the sound quality compared to Audirvana or Amarra.  This was as of a year or so ago tho, when J River was pretty new to Mac.  Is there any definitive consensus on sound quality with J River anyone?

[steve in jersey]

Yep.

[

"NASZILLA    Ohhhh, monster !!!"

Does the system tell you when it wants to play music ? I would'nt disagree with it , it knows where you live !