harddrive and performance question

hi there. i do not own an external hardrive yet but will be getting one soon so i put about 40gb of videos on my macbook. my friend told me that this would slow down the performance and that when i put the files on my external harddrive i should format my harddrive to optimise my macs performance again. is this the right thing to do and if so how do i do it.

thanks for any help you can offer.

If the hard drive on your MacBook is getting full - say around 80% used space, then the addition of videos would certainly slow it down. But the same can be said for any type of file once the drive is nearing its capacity.

So the answer to your question is it depends on how much empty space remains on your drive. Moving videos and music (iTunes Library) to an external drive makes sense if your internal drive is getting full.

As for drive fragmentation being caused once the video files are moved to an external, it should not be a problem. The Unix file system is fairly resistant to fragmentation unlike FAT-32 or even NTFS.

There is an optimizer program available for OS X called iDefrag ($29.95).

Regards.

alrite sound man thanks alot.