[soma]

Hi Folks,

Some of this query I could find with a little digging (moving to External Drives etc) but it's a little convoluted and I'm beginning to panic!

I've had this iMac for over a year now and it's never once let me down (I can't recommend macs enough and steered a few friends towards the 'light' ).
Recently however, the performance of my machine has slowed down somewhat:

(*spec: 24" iMac (previous model) 2Gb Ram, 2.33Hz Intel Core 2 Duo, 250Gb HD.)

Unsurprisingly however - I have around 15gb memory left (I believe you should have at least 25% of the HD free?) mainly filled with Video (I run HDV via FCP). I'm in the process today of ordering a GTech GRaid 2 (FW800 500Gb) mainly for FCS (final cut pro studio - HDV footage) which will bail me out video wise (i have a few projects coming up).

I also have an external 500Gb (Western Dig) I'm using for iTunes.
What I'd like to do is as follows:

Move my photo files (iPhoto and other images files) onto this drive, I'll use the 'create Alias' route for iPhoto (which works well with iTunes). although not sure how I'd move the other photo files (I've never used external drives, aside from the iTunes files, in the past).
I'd like also to move the other files from the internal drive onto externals (I'll eventually build them up and properly back them up - financially, that is not an option at the moment.
Via Disk Inventory I can see that a large portion of this HD (100Gb) is taken up by QT files (a large amount of FCP scratch files). I'd like to move these to the current USB external but point the scratch files/FCS (DVD studio Pro/compressor/soundtrack pro et al) to the new Gtech (when it arrives).
Completed QT mov/files I'd like to keep on the current USB 500gb HD (and this is where I'm a little stuck - in seperating certain QT files/movies from the FCP mov files/render files et al...unless I'm thinking to hard about this and media manager in FCP will help with this?

I can kind of see the limitations with iMacs with regard to backing up/HD space but for the time being I have no other choice than to 'share' the stress onto a couple of external drives.

Apologies if I've missed any info in asking these questions, but slightly worried about an impending crash/mess up of files once I start shifting files around!?!

Many thanks.