Moving iTunes library from one external hard drive to another, playlists

Here's my question. I keep my iTunes library on an external drive. My 250GB extrernal drive is full, so I'm moving my entire library to a new 500GB hard drive.
What do I have to do so my hundreds of playlists (most mixes with dozens of songs) still function once I've moved the music over?
Do I delete everything from my old drive, then use the 'add to library' function on the entire new drive? If I do that, will iTunes be able to find the tunes in each playlist?
Thanks!

I DON'T MIND DRAGGING THINGS OVER; TH PROBLEM IS, WHEN I TRY TO PLAY PLAYLISTS AFTER MOVING STUFF TO THE NEW DRIVE, EVERY SONG WILL ASK "FILE NOT FOUND--WOULD YOU LIKE TO LOCATE IT?" WITH 50,000 mp3s, it will take forever to rebuild all my playlists. Is there a way to have iTunes search a new drive and recognize the songs as being the same as the ones on the old drive, so you don't have to do this manually?
Also, if I do use the 'consolidate library' approach-- what happens if I drag all my other music folders into my itunes folder manually on the old drive, then try consolidate--will it copy EVERYTHING over to the new drive, or only the stuff that was in the iTunes music folder on the old drive from the beginning (since everything else I used "add to library' but not 'copy to itunes music folder'.
iTunes should have some more built in utility options to allow it to find everything in the library when it moves to a new drive, even if one chooses to keep music in a different format than the 'itunes music folder' approach. .

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