I Know Nothing About External Hardrives

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MacBook (Leopard)
I've always had Macs but never used an external hardrive. Can someone please tell me the basics? Does the space on the hd add to the macintosh hd? Or is it a seperate drive? If i transfer all my music from my computer onto an external hardrive will i still be able to play it in my itunes or do i need to create a new user?

Thanks very much
 
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MacBook 2.0GHz White, 512MB RAM, 60GB HDD
When you plug in an external hard drive, it shows up as a mounted volumn much like a CD-ROM or a USB pen drive. I believe you can tell iPhoto to put it's library on a different drive if you so desire, so no new user is required.
 
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gingenosnam
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thanks very much. in itunes preferences you can change the music folder location so i reckon thats all good. cheers
 
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eechiwawa

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I've just had my MacBook for a couple of days, and was thinking about buying an external hard drive to back up the contents of my 60GB iPod and also to store video files and backed up program files.
Are they fast when moving or playing files, and would firewire or USB2 be better?
 
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Well I'm using a firewire drive and I haven't had any problems, general consensus is that firewire is faster. Also you could use it as a boot drive which you can't with usb2.
 
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eechiwawa

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I would like the option to use it as a bootable drive, so firewire it is then. So, would it be possible to have a Windows XP partition on the external drive using Bootcamp and be able to choose between booting up from that or OSX from the internal drive?
I know that should belong in the Windows forum, but its really a ciontinuation of my thoughts about buying an external drive.

edit: Was looking at this - http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=221&language=en
Firewire and USB. Can get it in the UK for about £90.
 

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