I have nearly 1T of data in my ITunes files, about three times larger than my MacBook hard drive capacity. So for a while now I’ve been keeping my iTunes data on an external storage device – a WD – Western Digital. (With a Time Machine backup on a second external drive.) The external device failed once last year and WD replaced it. It just failed again and I don’t know whether it’s still under warranty.
I am wondering what might be a better option. I asked an Apple genius about using a wireless Time Capsule but he said that he has seen a few people having trouble when they try that.
I looked into getting a bigger internal hard drive, but themaximum available seems to be 1T and obviously that wouldn’t make much sense.
So any suggestions?
Any response to my actual question? I’d like to avoid having to buy a new external drive every 18 months or so.
I don’t understand the question.
Hard drives fail - that’s a given. 18 months seems a little soon, but if it’s still under warranty, get them to replace it. You might want to consider getting an “enterprise” rated hard drive, which will come with a longer warranty. It will still fail, though.
I’d invest in network attached storage with drive redundancy.
I don’t really understand the question, either. It’s almost certainly not iTunes that’s making the drives fail; it’s much more likely to be something about your local power situation, or you’ve just gotten unlucky. If you don’t have a UPS on the external drive, get one before you replace it. And buy the drive from someone else.
Or get a USB/Firewire/e-sata SATA drive dock: they’re cheap, and you just feed in bare drives, which are also cheap, so you can afford to have multiples of things.