re: Just purchased MacBook air...please help with storage options

My Air is not my primary computer so most of my pics and music are on an iMac and a rapidly filling 1 TB hard drive.

If your Air is your primary computer an external hard drive is pretty painless.

Just format it MAC Extended Journaled (it will likely come FAT 32 out of the box) and it will work better with the Mac.

You may want to look at your libraries and maybe just move one to the external if one is much larger (my photo library is very large compared to my iTunes). iPhoto and especially Aperture can handle this pretty easily. I think iTunes can be a little more problematic in this regard because of permissions with how many computers can access your iTunes account.

If you do a lot of video editing and move big files back and forth a Thunderbolt drive may help but they are pricey.

An external USB 3.0 1 TB external can be had very cheap lately ($70 or less) so it is easy to try out and maybe even get another for a backup solution.

Hope that helps.