Purchasing Advice: Internal vs External/Firewire vs USB

My parents have a late 2006 iMac (17-inch, 2.0GHz) that has a 160 GB hard drive. Their iTunes library is becoming quite large with lots of music and movies and the hard drive is close to full these days. So I was wondering if it would be good enough to keep the iTunes library on an external hard drive or would you guys advise to run it from an upgraded internal drive? Personally I don't think the hard drive upgrade is too difficult but I'd rather not do it if I don't have to. Also if external is good enough, is it better to use Firewire (in this case 400) or USB, when iTunes is being used for several hours a day? Also what are the recommended brands of external drives?

I have to agree with Barbara on this. In fact I keep most of my large data files (photos and music) on external FW 800 drives. The only thing I keep on my internal drive is smaller data files, apps and OS X. As it turns out I also use Lacie drives, I have 3 one for Time Machine, another for a bootable backup using SuperDuper and the last for my iTunes library and growing Aperture library. All three are daisy chained together which has been dead reliable. From what I've been able to gather the following seem to be the most popular choices. All have similar features and build quality.
OWC Mercury Pro series
Lacie Quadra D2 series
G-Tech G Drive series
Regards,
Roger

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