I love my Mac Mini. It took a bit to adjust to OS X at first. My only memory of being on a Mac prior to my Mac Mini was playing Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? when I was just wee one in elementary school. Once I learned to stop resisting and allow OS X to work for me, it wasn’t long before I became very attached to my Mac.

While I was still adjusting to OS X, my 40 GB hard drive seemed almost like too much space. But then the more I used the Mac the more it started to become my default desktop. I passed my 15″ FPD from the Mac to my Debian box and gave it share rights to my 19″ FPD with my main PC desktop. In a matter of weeks my 40 GB hard drive shrunk to 8 GB of available space. :gasp:

Where the hell did all that space go? Using this handy tool, Disk Inventory X, I was able to see graphically what was clogging up my drive. Obviously: music, videos, pictures, and software.

Much of my music and videos can be burned and deleted to free up space, however, having a more permanent place for such things is beginning to be more appealing than the infinite number of disks that I have that get stuffed into drawers.

It was time for an upgrade. I love taking things apart and I’ve wanted to take apart the Mac Mini since the day I got it, but have never gotten around to actually doing it. But instead of just upgrading the hard drive and having another spare drive used as a paperweight, I decided an external drive would be a great solution. Not just to free up space on the Mac but essentially freeing up space for all the computers on the network and keeping all of our media in one place.

Thanks to Danielle, for Xmas I received the LaCie 160 GB fire wire hard drive. The LaCie drive is designed to be stacked under the Mac Mini. Brilliant.

Keeping the LaCie drive formatted with HFS+ Mac format, I used MediaFour’s MacDrive on my Windows computers to allow the new drive to be seen under windows and the ability to read and write to the disk, I now have a drive strictly for media storage that everybody can use.

Now that I have a central storage place for all of my different media files, I needed to change my library location for iTunes and iPhoto so that everything will now be stored on the external drive. An easy task for iTunes:

Changing Your Library Location for iTunes:
I just copied my original iTunes library over to the new external drive, deleted the original folder, then in iTunes under Preferences->Advanced-> Change folder location. Or you can do it the proper way.

Changing Your Library Location for iPhoto:
In iPhoto, there is no option for changing the default folder location. I have no idea why. But if you hold down your Option key while clicking on iPhoto from the dock, it will prompt you to create a library or choose a library. So first, I copied my iPhoto library to the new location and holding down the option key and launching iPhoto, I chose the new library. Ta-Da!

The LaCie drive is an excellent solution to maximizing storage space for both Windows and Macs, more specifically, the Mac Mini. I recommend it to anybody looking to expand storage space.