Need Help with External Hard drives and too much music

I am not terribly tech-savvy, and I need your help. I have a G5 PPC dual processor with an internal 250GB drive. I have two seagate firewire/USB2 external hard drives. One is 250GB and one is 350GB. I want to know how to use them to get my Mac to run faster and better.
My original hard drive is 7GB shy of being full. Almost half of this is my itunes library which is over 100GB. The older (250GB) hard drive has about 150GB of photos/videos.
My Mac is running slow as molasses and when I power up the external hard drives it slows down to what I recall my original Mac Plus ran like.
I use the G5 primarily to work with photos, illustrations and creating the occasional DVD with video and photos. the apps I use most often are Photoshop, Illustrator and Painter. I always listen to music while work.
I hope all of this information is helpful! Here is my question:
What is the best way for me to set up and use these external hard drives to return my G5 to its original blazing (to me) fast speed?
PPC G5 Mac OS X (10.4.9)

I think you should look at adding two 500GB internal drives. I'd say Maxtor MaxLine Pro for cost, but they also run much warmer (43ºC even when nearly doing zilch) so I'd go with WD RE2 500GB for $40 ea. more.
dump whatever you don't need, trash anything that is hogging space and is just temp file or useless cache. Web browsers can leave behind a ton of small files eating up tens of MBs.
Use SuperDuper to backup/clone your drive.
Disk Warrior 4 to repair (after it gets to 15% free, or just forget for now).
A 250GB drive formats to 240GB and you have ~3% free it looks like.
For every data drive plan to have two backup drives.
Keep your boot drive to 40% used.
And your data drive to 60%.
Backups can go a little higher.
Drives are cheap and inexpensive, especially for the space and performance. And they have improved SATA over the years it has been out.
By doing a backup followed by erasing your drive, and then restoring it, using SuperDuper, which optimizes the organization, skips copying temp files that aren't needed, it also defragments your files. I would do backup daily to different sets that you "rotate." And before any OS update. And do the erase and restore probably every 2 months.
Make sure you keep one drive partition somewhere that is just your disk utility emergency boot drive that is not a copy of working system, used for doing repairs like running Disk Warrior and Disk Utility.
You may need to repair; backup; even erase and restore your external drives. Rather than spend on vendor made case, just pick up a good FireWire case either with drive, or bare (and add your own). I think it'd add 500GB FW drive though.
Why?
To begin backup of your current drive. To leave your other FW drives "as is" for now.
Then install a new internal 500GB drive as well so you now have a good current backup, and you have moved your data off 250GB to 500GB. If anything happens, you have one off line FW backup.
Then begin to clean up, organize, and get your FW drives working. It sure sounds like they have had some directory or file problems.
You can find a lot of Firewire and SATA drive choices over at OWC:
http://www.macsales.com/firewire/

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Hi all,
I have been having trouble with my external hard drive.
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In disk utility is seems to show that there are files on the disk but I cannot see them?
At the bottom is shows that there are files on the disk!
PLEASE HELP!!!!
Here is a screenshot of my disk utility

Ok just to clarify the format issue...
Just move the data from the external drive, format and then move it back if you want, as JiveMasterT explained.
If the external drive is FAT file system, then you don't need to format the drive unless you are planning on using the drive as an OSX backup.

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Most external FW enclosures have 2xFW800 ports that allow daisy-chaining multiple drives.
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How do I move music from an old external hard drive to a new external hard drive and have itunes find it?

If you have a time machine back up of your current drive you can do this
Shut down your computer, install the new drive. While the computer is off plug in the external hard drive that you have your time machine back up on. Hold Option key while the computer turnes on, let go of the option key once you get a grey screen. Shortly after you'll see a list of bootable drives, select the one that has your time machine back up on it and boot into that drive.
From there go into disk utility, format your new drive too, osx extended journaled ( I think, double check that, its been awhile since ive had to do this), hit format
Exit disk utility and then you can use time machine to copy all your exisit data to the new hhd and then your pretty much done.
There is also a program called Carbon Cloner that will do esentially the same thing however I've never uesed it.

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So I save my music and photos to an external hard drive. The drive is partitioned to also be the back up for my Time Machine. I live in an old house with the electricity for my MacBook Pro and the external hard drive coming from a wall plug which drapes scrape over when opening and closing, occasionally moving the plugs to the point of cutting off the electricity. Sometimes when that happens, the MacBook Pro won't read the external hard drive and I have to restart the computer for it to read the HD.
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What I was trying to tell you is that all the music and photos that are on the same drive as your Time Machine backup must also be backed up elsewhere. Unlike all the stuff on your primary (internal) hard drive, those photos and music are not backed up at all unless you have copies of them on a different drive. If your Time Machine hard drive should fail before you do that, they'll all be lost. So copy all the music and photos to your second external hard drive as soon as you are able to do so.
I generally consider the nuisance of backing up extra hard drives to other extra hard drives burdensome and annoying enough so that I always upgrade my primary (internal) hard drive whenever I begin to run short of space on the one I'm using. Now that it's possible to get 750GB and 1TB internal drives for MBPs, I'll get one of those as soon as my present 250GB drive fills up to about 80% of its capacity. I don't want to lug around an external drive in order to have all my stuff with me when I'm away from my home or office — I want it all on my internal drive, and I want to be able to back all of it up at once to an external drive of the same or a larger size. At least until I outgrow a 1TB drive, and I think that will be a while.

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Ok, well i was using limewire to get some llegal shareware files and wanted to make sure i didnot get any viruses.
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Help with external hard drive please????

I am ready to chuck my computer out of the window I am so frustrated!! I really hope someone can help... Fingers crossed, here goes...
I have two macs - a MacBook running OSX 4.11 and an iBook G4 running OSX 3.9. I also have an Iomega external hard drive. I reformatted it when I bought it for the MacBook, and have been using it fine.
Now, I want to move a load of music from my iBook to the external hard drive. But when I plug in the hard drive, the iBook says 'MAC OSX CANNOT READ THE VOLUMES INSERTED' and gives me options of initialize, cancel, or eject.
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THANKS

Ok, deep breath & relax...
What format & partition table is the drive in?
On the macbook with drive installed, Open up Mac HD/Applications/Disk Utility.app
Select the drive from the list. If the partition scheme is GUID, then 10.3 won't be able to see it.
& changing requires a reformat of the drive.
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Tiger install DVDs are in short supply. Tiger is no longer available at the Apple Store but may be available for $129 by calling Apple Phone Sales @ 1-800-MY-APPLE (1-800-692-7753). For other sources, do a Google search for MA453Z/A (10.4.6), MA190Z/A (10.4.3) and M9639Z/A (10.4). Also look on eBay. Be sure & buy a retail version (black with silver X) and not a model specific version (gray) (See http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1976068 Can I use another Mac's system restore disc on my Mac?.
Also check these web stores: http://www.lacomputercompany.com/cgi-bin/rpcart/index.cgi?command=dispitem&type= sku&sku=19521 http://www.allmac.com/shop/index.php?cPath=5_10003
After you install the base 10.4.x, update to the final Tiger version 10.4.11. Here's the link for the 10.4.11 combo update http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24901?viewlocale=en_US
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http://www.apple.com/support/tiger/install/
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http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Tiger_Install_Setup_Guide.pdf
 Cheers, Tom

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First post and all that. Thanks for taking the time to help me out.
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http://www.howtogeek.com/104298/sync-your-ios-device-with-a-new-computer-without -losing-data/
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https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3141
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Need Help with External Hard drives and too much music

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