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If I have a 2GB internal drive, and a 500GB iTunes library, are there any disadvantages to keeping the iTunes library on my internal drive? I would also have all my personal files, etc. on the internal drive. It would be my only (non-backup) drive.

I'm just curious if this will cause a system slowdown or anything related, and if it is better to use an external hard drive.

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No, there aren't. – Sathya♦ May 20 '11 at 3:38
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I assume you mean 2TB internal drive? – Console May 20 '11 at 7:06
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Loading music off an external drive should be fine, as most music files are not huge, so the I/O times will be fine.

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I may have structured my question poorly. I don't want to use an external drive. I want to just use my internal drive. I just don't want my large library to have a negative overall effect on my computing experience. – Welsher May 20 '11 at 2:48
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I can't see how you would see any performance hit by having music on the same drive as your other files. Music files are small and can be read into memory within milliseconds; if anything, the SATA connection to your internal drive (if that is what you have) is going to drop the music into memory faster than an external over Firewire or USB 2.0, which should result in better system performance.

HDD performance really only becomes an issue when you have large files scattered over the disc and lots of continuous activity on the disk (say, between your system swapfile, your photoshop scratch file, and an uncompressed HD video). Then your disk may thrash a bit as it tries to keep up with everything, but music isn't going to cause any such issues.

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