No more room on 1tb hard drive..what's best to do

The short answer is yes, you can split your music collection over 2 drives. But I think in your case that might not be the optimal decision, as it sounds like it would interfere with your backup mechanism at the moment.

Better would be to get a 2 TB drive and either a 3 or 4 TB drive. You can likely just take the drive itself and install into the existing enclosures by unscrewing a few screws and replacing the existing drives.

Copy one of the 1 TB drives into the 2 TB drives. Then make the larger (3 or 4 TB) drives the Time Machine, and ensure that it backs up the external drive. The difference is that this will give you a more complete backup and allow you to recover from deleted files, viruses, mistakes in tagging, etc. I also recommend an online backup service to guard against theft and fire

Michael

"Better would be to get a 2 TB drive and either a 3 or 4 TB drive. You can likely just take the drive itself and install into the existing enclosures by unscrewing a few screws and replacing the existing drives."

In theory, yes, but have you ever tried it? I've done it several times and its no easy task. The drives inside the external enclosures are internal drives, so there's no problem there. Its the tamper proof case that's difficult. You need to be good with tools and be really careful, but it can be done.

Assuming you are OK with opening up the cases, newer 1TB internal drives are half height, so depending on how old your 1 TB external drive is, it may make a difference. If its a few years old, it should be full size, like a 2 or 3tb drive. But if your current external drive isn't that old, it may have a half height drive inside, and a full size one may not fit.

zd542, yes, I have done that. Most of my external drives are from OWC (macsales.com), and it amounts to a few Phillips screws and 3.5" hard drives. You're right in that the exact nature of the external drive needs to be taken into consideration as to how easy it is to replace it with a larger drive.

But yes, under the right circumstances (and understanding your equipment well), this kind of upgrade is do-able.

Michael

The ones that I opened up are Seagate's. I think I did a WD also.