sup ragamuffins.
im considering buying a netbook, to replace my aged laptop.
the only thing that im dubious about is music.

all big files are stored on my 1TB HDD, photos etc, however my music is on my laptop (14gb of) as i listen to music around the house, through wireless headphones, off of rythmbox on the computer (ubuntu mediaplayer jobby)

if i were to get a netbook, i wouldnt be able to keep my music on it.

how would a netbook, or a External Hard drive, or the USB cable inbetween, handle streaming that kind of information?

its USB2, the new HDD is super fast, seems to be able to move quicker than the computer can think.
it seems to stream movies off it ok too…..
would a USB connection be as good as an internal hard drive?
or are there limitations?
would i risk buggering up either part?
heat build up in a netbook?

i realise i could continue to use the laptop for music, but thats not the question at the moment.

many spanks in advance!

Ol

audio signals are so low bandwidth you could stream it happily off pretty much anything. The hard disk is going to be massively faster than the wifi connection. You can do this sort of streaming off a mobile phone nowadays, so a netbook will have no problems.

The only hassle I can see is having to drag a disk around with you when you move the netbook around.

Joe

if i were to get a netbook, i wouldnt be able to keep my music on it.

Why? Most netbooks will happily store 14GB of music.

no trouble at all to stream – your broadband over a USB dongle will be chugging WAY more data than you could ever imagine needing to get through to wireless headphones.

likewise, the data rate needed to stream media is FAR less than the data rate that can be achieved when copying data from one device to another over USB2.

alot of netbooks have hdd's of 120-160Gb, unless of course you specifically want the robustness of SSD.

will stream quite nicely from experience of using a NAS to stream to my netbook. wouldnt rely on the speakers being good quality (tinny and sh@@e on my dell netbook) and thus would recommend the wireless headphone or amp/hifi route (and if you are plugging it into an amp, then why not go down the route of a dedicated wireless music player attached to your hifi and stream to that and keep the netbook for well…the web and the like)

my little fujitsu seimens netbook has 60gig drive

to be honest though the little keyboard is a pain in the arse for regular use

I've got an HP mini which i bought for travel but seems to have replace my normal laptop. 2GB ram, xp pro sp3 etc
Its got an 80g SSD and i have about 20g of music on it – works fine. Its pretty quick really considering what it is and i just have a monitor and kb at work etc.