Problems using WD My Book Live w/iTunes

The short version of this question is: how do I configure my My Book Live (MBL) so that it stays mounted (and automatically re-mounts upon start-up) on my iMac? I keep all my music files on the MBL and play them back through iTunes on my iMac. But each time I sleep or restart my computer I have to manually connect again to the MBL, which is cumbersome and slow.

I think there is probably a pretty basic resolution to this issue and I apologize that I am not savvy enough to track it down myself. Thanks for any help!

The longer, more detailed version of what’s driving this question follows below:

I bought the 2TB My Book Live in order to store a very large (>500GB) iTunes library that I didn’t want cluttering up my iMac’s hard drive. When I bought it, I thought that I might connect the My Book to our wireless router and be able to configure our iMac and several hard drives to play music directly from it over our wireless network. For a variety of reasons I couldn’t make that work, so I’ve resorted to connecting the My Book directly to our iMac desktop, and then Home Sharing to our other computers. It works well enough.

My problem now is that after the iMac sleeps or is shut down there is a significant delay in reconnecting to the MBL. It will often take 20+ seconds to connect and bring up the top level menu on the MBL, and perhaps 30 seconds to list all the folders in the large iTunes media folder. So that’s problem number 1: is there a way to improve the speed of reading the EHD?

Problem number 2 is probably related: every time the iMac sleeps/restarts, when I open iTunes I get the error message that the iTunes library cannot be found, and I need to create or locate one. I then go through the rigamarole of locating the library folder on our MBL – which, per problem number 1, takes a while – and then iTunes works just fine. Is iTunes “forgetting” the location of the Media Folder each time? Or is it because the MBL doesn’t stay mounted that iTunes can’t find the folder and needs me to do it manually? I think the latter. I have set the Media Folder in iTunes>Preferences>Advanced to the appropriate folder on the EHD, so that’s not the issue.

By default and unlike Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS Systems are unable to automatically reconnect/relocate shared network locations, and login items must be manually created.

The following official support article from Apple should be able to assist:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2602