externals

Ok I have a quick question regarding external drives, I plan on getting a nice sized 7200 rpm external here soon. I'll either be putting the OS on it and using it as a storage/boot drive with my ibooks drive as my main storage drive, or I'll be using it to run my apps off it and keep the ibook drive as the main drive.

If I ran osx off the external, will I be getting faster speeds? And the flip side of that, if I ran OSX off the main drive inside the ibook and all my major apps and games off the external, would the mian drive heat up as well?

The main reason besides storage is that I'm tired of my ibooks main drive scorching my hand when I use photoshop, dreamweaver, or play games. If I can play apps off the second drive with OSX on the main drive without the main drive heating up, that would be awesome. Else I'd like to see how it runs with OSx on the external drive.


I know that's all confusing but if you have any questions of what I'm trying to do ask

Whoops this is in the wrong forum, I didn't even realize, could I get a mod to move it?

Here's the thing; anything you put on the external takes longer to access, and as for putting the OS on it and booting from it... I'm not so sure that it would work, but at the very least it would be slow. A friend of mine has a lot of success putting his apps on the external, and the files he works with stored on yetr another external. My suggestion would be to move out everything but the OS and your taxing apps, Photoshop, games, etc. (leave that stuff on the main drive). All extraneous files and folders should be kept on your storage deivce, as well as your less taxing apps, iChat, web browsers, iTunes, iPhoto. You could probably also put Dreamweaver on your external as well.

Hrm, thanks for the advice. I'll give it a go. I just assumed it would be faster becuase the firewire could transfer just as fast if not faster than a harddrive, couple that with a much faster harddrive

Well Graphite has just done this with his iMac and he says that everything seems faster...
Should do really, since the internal iBook drives are only 4200rpm and his is 7200rpm.

If you can live with the external solution - go for it!

Dominion said:

Hrm, thanks for the advice. I'll give it a go. I just assumed it would be faster becuase the firewire could transfer just as fast if not faster than a harddrive, couple that with a much faster harddrive

Click to expand...

Run a benchmark on both drives to see for yourself. My personal experience has been that Firewire and internal drives (assuming both have the same rotation speed) are very similar in overall performance.

even with the mac mini people are using external drives to speed up their machines. If you can live with the external drive and not moving around alot... then go for the external drive it will be faster.

Ok I think I'm just going to get the drive and do the benchmarking as suggested .

As for living with it, I've found a really slim vertical external and I already have the worlds smallest firewire cable (I think it's about 5 inches long ) that I'll be using. So it's still very portable to me.

I think the first trial will be games and such on the external, to see if it taxes my main drive and go from there.

Thanks for the advice everyone