I finally had to buy an external hard drive to house my music library. (I’d replaced the old Mac Mini’s internal one 5+ years ago.) Below is my current daily listening rig.
Intel Core 2 Duo Mac Mini (circa 2007)
1 TB WD Elements external HD
OS X 10.5.8
iTunes 10.6.3 (<– a version that’s still good!!)
160 GB iPod classic (<– best ever!!!!!!!!)
Library: 35,000 items; 100 days of music end-to-end
The iPod will die some day – it’s already been through a few total fritz-outs and and full re-syncs – but that’s survivable. (This will probably be the event that prompts me to enter the smartphone era.) I’m not sure I can go on living without iTunes 10 and my library, though. I probably need to investigate some kind of solid state drive machine that will boot Leopard.
Or maybe there’s library management software on Linux that could replace iTunes.