boot Xp via eSata Express card 34?

Well, I have a Core Duo MBP with the 34mm expresscard. I'm currently taking advantage of Bootcamp but I just use XP at work for CAD.
It's not really a big deal but recently my son has been getting into video creation and is taking up most of the available space... he's getting quite good at it as well.

(1 HFS+, 1 NTFS, and 1 FAT32 partition)

I sort have forced him to get an external HD but he's been complaining about a major slowdown. He's currently connected to his external drive via FW 400. After having done some research, I realize my options are upgrade his external drive to FW800 or eSATA II. I just bought him a 750gig Seagate external drive and have exceeded the return policy. I figure 100GB (as opposed to his available 4.5GB) would be plenty of room for him to make several videos and toss them on the external HD when he's done which is plenty big.

So ultimately, the question at hand. Via an eSata expresscard, can I boot XP?

It is good you are having him work on another disk for video work. The system drive is worked harder when doing video work. Which will/may reduce the life of it.

You really shouldnt notice any difference in a FW400 drive compared to a FW800 drive unless the FW800 drive is running a multi-disk RAID configuration.

to be honest, I'm pretty set on the eSATA solution (for me)... the fact that I can pop in any internal disk seems most ideal and my equipment mantinence staff just gave me an array of barely used 74GB "Raptors" thinking I used a workstation... which is plenty big and supposed to be fast(?). If I didn't need to be so mobile I'd simply use a workstation.

The more I read, the more confused I get... I've called Apple; nothing. I've called local Mac (only) stores; nothing. I've asked all the tech guru's I know including the two on my staff; nothing.

I guess the bootable situation just isn't possible though... and it kind of defeats the purpose.

Any suggestions as to who would know whether or not it works?

Maybe a better question would be:
What determines whether a device is bootable? EFI? Driver? OS? Hardware?

Heck, maybe I'd be better off just getting him his own computer...

To confirm the problem really lies in disk I/O, start up the Activity Monitor in the Applications/Utiltity folder and review all of the statistics there as he does his editing/rendering. The two other common problems could be saturation of the CPUs, or running out of memory causing disk swapping.

The other thing that could be problematic is importing video from a firewire camera to the firewire drive. I've seen some complaints that you can get dropped frames. The solution might be to capture to a partition on the system drive, then transfer that to the external drive.

xstep said:

To confirm the problem really lies in disk I/O, start up the Activity Monitor in the Applications/Utiltity folder and review all of the statistics there as he does his editing/rendering. The two other common problems could be saturation of the CPUs, or running out of memory causing disk swapping.

The other thing that could be problematic is importing video from a firewire camera to the firewire drive. I've seen some complaints that you can get dropped frames. The solution might be to capture to a partition on the system drive, then transfer that to the external drive.

Click to expand...

I'm not quite sure what you're talking about...

I'm not out to get any information about his current ex. drive because the internal one (7200) works much better. What I want to do is boot XP via an external drive and leave it at work... As far as I understand, this isn't possible with USB or FW on the Macs...

Edit: I've just learned that it IS possible to boot XP via USB with some slight alterations to the installation disk...

What about a these expresscards with eSATA?

jgrimes80 said:

I'm not quite sure what you're talking about...

Click to expand...

I was thinking your trying to get your sons work to be a little quicker.