I want to buy and external hard drive to put all my music and photos on since my
MacBook only has 60 gig hard drive and has filled up fast with photos and music.
Will I be able to play my music through itunes from my external HD? And if so,
if I am playing music for long periods of time from a portable external HD that
does not have a fan, will it overheat? Also, will I be able to view, organize,
and edit my photos using iphoto from and external HD? Thanks. -Franky
Using an external Hard Drive on the mac is almost the same as using the built in internal drive. What’s going to happen is this: OS X will mount the hard drive on the desktop (Finder) and you will then be able to use the drive with any application in iLife. In iTunes you can can either go to File>Add Folder to Library or you can just drag your songs into iTunes (this is called the jukebox.) The same thing (more or less) happens with iPhoto.
About the heating….Most manufacturers make sure that their drives will be able to run for hours (indefinitely if need be) without overheating. There are a few ways they do this. First they add in fans (like you’ve mentioned) and secondly they use slower drives, usually 5400 RPM. The slow RPM of the drive won’t really matter because most of the time your using USB anyway.
Now your external drive is a portable drive which means that at it’s heart is the internal hard drive of a laptop. This drive isn’t going to give out much heat, at least not enough for you to worry about.
-The Fake Geek