I have over 6,000 songs or 30GB of music on my desktop computer and I access it via my laptop... I was wondering if there was a more efficent way of having this setup as it is kind of annoying browsing through my collection since there is a short delay between changing folders and such.
I'n the process of moving similar size catalogue from PC to Mac. Biggest annoyance is crap ID3 Tagging on the older stuff. iTunes seems to be able to handle up to 1000 songs so far OK. Everything still snappy. You might want to get a faster hard drive with shorter access times.
I have ~25,000 mp3s on my home server and I use Media Center 10 as my player. But to browse and control Media Center I use a program called Netremote. I run Netremote on my main pc which controls media center which is running on my HTPC (Home Theater Personal Computer) which is accessing the music files from my media server. I also run Netremote on a touchscreen tablet PC which controls all of my home theater equipment. I love this setup, it works brilliantly.
How about using a USB hard drive? I use a Seagate 80GB USB that I got for $60 which has worked great for the past year.
Personally i would say a 15k rpm scsi drive would be overkill for a media drive. There is a good chance it would be network lag and the only thing i could recomend is getitng a router/switch and network cards that use 1gig ethernet and getting hold of some cat 6 or 7 cable. I am not sure how available that cable is though we just use cat5e. Them changes would significatly reduce network lag