My iMac is my media server and the iTunes content is fed from a 1TB Buffalo External Combo Hard Drive connected through Firewire.
Whenever my iMac went to sleep, on wake up, my iTunes would hang with the SPOD. I had to force quit iTunes. Now worse, my external hard disk would hang too and the only way to fix it was to hard boot the drive, which, of course is really really bad. Thankfully, I hadn’t lost any data.
I moved up to iTunes 9 and Snow Leopard and this didn’t fix it.
After a bit of googling, I used AppZapper to delete iTunes and all its preference files. That fixed the iTunes hanging after the wake up, but it didn’t fix my external hard drive problem.
Turns out Buffalo Combo drives do have this problem with Macs. The solution that has eventually worked for me is to switch over to USB2.0 for the drive. It has been humming along for the past few days waking up from sleep without any problems.
So at least in my case, there was at least some iTunes preference that caused iTunes to hang and at least some hardware incompatibility that causes the external hard disk to hang.
