[Freeflyer]

Hello,

I've posted a question in the software forum

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=163180

regarding the use of itunes across a network on an external firewire drive. I thought I'd post the hardware specific question here in case I can get some alternative answers.

I have a Tibook and my plan is to plug an external firewire drive into an old pc that I have and keep that as a server. This way I could have the mp3's available when I want them at home without taking up lots of space on the laptop hard drive.

I also want the option to unplug the drive from the server and take it with me if needed on trips where I need the extra drive space.

As the drive would be mac formatted in HFS+, can this work with either windows (currently running win95) or linux (redhat 6 or 7). I'm guessing linux would be better with support for HFS+ file systems. Could I format the drive on the mac and have it plugged into the laptop then just unplug and connect it to the pc. Being able to swap it between the machines if necessary would be pretty handy.

Is there much of an advantage in this situation to the 7200rpm drives that require a power supply, as opposed to the 4200rpm 2.5" laptop drives. I noticed that I could get a maxtor 2.5" 120Gb laptop drive for ~$170 which could be powered from the 6pin firewire on the Tibook if I decided to take it travelling with me. As most of the time, the files would be moving across the wifi network in the house, so I doubted that the speed increase of the faster drives would be that necessary.

Any preferences on drive and enclosure makes?

Thanks,

J.

[superlarry]

linux can't use hfs+ (at least not easily or well), but it supports its predecessor, hfs. i'm not sure about windows support for hfs.. i don't think there's a free way to do it. the easiest thing to do would be to format it as ms-dos, since osx supports this fully, as do win95 and linux.
side note: good luck finding firewire drivers for win95, or a machine with firewire that win95 will run on. linux is much more practical for this, i think.
the speed difference between the drives shouldn't make a difference for mp3's other than copying them to/from the drive.
i'm not sure about drive/enclosure makes, other than that it's usually *much* cheaper if you get a drive and an enclosure separately and assemble it yourself.