Need help setting up Macbook Pro and external hard drive(s)

Question

I apologize for the vague title but I was limited to so many characters.
Here's my situation (sorry for being verbose, I just want to be thorough)
Right now I have a Macbook Pro and a 500 GB external hard drive (Western Digital using USB 2.0 connection). I've outgrown the external hard drive and am ready to upgrade my external memory.
Here's my issues right now:
My iTunes library and music reside on the external hard drive. Using iTunes is painfully, I mean brutally, slow for some reason. For example: if I were to just change the genre of an average album, it takes upwards of 4 or 5 minutes to change the data. Compared to the POS Dell computer I used to run iTunes with (using the same external hard drive), the same task would take 5 seconds at the most. Likewise, if I try to watch a video that resides on that external hard drive right now, it skips and eventually stops because (presumably) the data is transferring extremely slowly. I have no idea, and haven't gotten any real answers, as to why this is happening with the Macbook and/or if using a Firewire connection would improve the speed.
Taking that into consideration, here's what I would like to do (and ask). I see myself having one 1T external hard drive for all my music and one 1T external hard drive for all my movies and videos. Ideally I would like to be able to access these two hard drives wirelessly with my Macbook and have it transfer the data very quickly - as it should IMO. Certainly a lot faster than it is now.
I would love to just be able to hook my Macbook up to my main stereo and run iTunes through it without having to lug around and messily connect the external hard drive which contains all the music. As well as being able to hook my Macbook up to the stereo and LCD monitor and be able to watch a video, again without the hassle of having to connect the external hard drive - which as I said prior, appears to transfer the data way too slowly anyway.
Any suggestions on what external hard drives I should get and any other hardware/software I need to run them wirelessly would be gratefully welcomed.
Thanks in advance (and I apologize for the long winded post)
MM

Answer 1

Obviously, FireWire is a fast connection, but for changing metadata, USB is plenty fast. Why it takes so long is anyones guess. Is it a USB 2.0 drive? Using external drives can be tricky. My father uses them for his gigantic library of almost 80,000 songs. When you have it setup properly, it works fine, but if you say forgot to have the external drive mounted when you launch iTunes, iTunes defaults the library back to your Music folder, then when you start importing, it puts in on the internal drive, then you have to go back and reset it, etc. Problem, with iTunes alone, you can only set one library, so if you want to use two drives, you will have to have one set at any given time.
So you could set the music one first, add to the library, then set it for movies, then add those to the library. Then keep the library set to the one you use most frequently, so you don't have to always switch. Once you import all media, and iTunes "knows" where to find the files, you can play them with no problems with two drives.
For wireless, you have a couple choices. If you have two Macs, you could keep one connected to the two drives, then with the other computer, just connect to the network and share the iTunes library so your other computer has access. If you want the music stored on a drive accessible wireless, you'll probably have to look to NAS, or some form of wireless storage. If you do that, their may even be a better third party software solution other than iTunes for managing multiple libraries.
This is something iTunes really needs. As libraries grow, one drive just isn't enough often.
Bryan