Am I better leaving my music on the imac drive or putting on thunderbolt external drive?

My current set-up is that I have a 6 year old imac. I also have an external hard drive where I moved all of my itunes content (about 400gb of movies, music, etc.) and I also moved our iphoto files to this external hard drive. This drive is connected by ethernet in our house and it feeds the apple TV that is in another room (wifi connected).
I just ordered the new imac retina (has yet to arrive) and I upgraded to the 1TB flash drive. I also ordered a thunderbolt external drive. My question is this...I believe a Flash drive is fast. I believe a Thunderbolt drive is fast. For accessing the content especially for Apple TV, is it actually better to leave the content on the imac going forward rather than a hard drive?
I had the external drive to free up hard drive space and to make it easier to move to a new mac when the time came. I had also hoped to find a way for apple tv to access the content even when the imac was turned off but I haven't been able to make that happen.
So, just asking here about leaving content on the new imac when it comes versus moving the data over to the thunderbolt drive.
Being that the apple tv will still be accessing content via wifi in the house, I wonder if I will see any speed improvements in streaming with the combo of a faster mac, faster thunderbolt, etc.
Hopefully upgrading to the flash drive was a smart decision in general.
Thanks.

Streaming will be faster from the new iMac. However it is still a good idea to keep the bulk of your material, 400 GB is a lot of content, on external drives. That serves to protect the material if an internal drive fails, and also keeps the internal drive from getting too loaded down. You can increase speed by simply moving content you want to use in the short term to the iMac SSD where it will be at its fastest speed, and then take it off when no longer needed there.
That gives the speed and security for your material.

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TigerMom28 wrote:
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LN

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Am I better leaving my music on the imac drive or putting on thunderbolt external drive?

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