external hard drive

W

whoriental

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I work at compUSA and the tech shop decided to get rid of excess parts. They were selling a 40gig notebook hard drive for 50 bucks and i figured i could buy that and a enclosure and it would make a external hard drive. What would be the best way to utilize this? Should I stick all of my mp3's on it? Should I stick the OSX on it and run it from there. I am just trying to look for some better performance.
 
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you can do both, but i doubt it will increase performance. even if the disk has higher rpm-s then you internal harddisk. firewire/usb will still limit the performane.
 
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In general, default notebook drives run at 4200. You can get 5400 drives as the default on some better notebooks. Some even have the 7200 RPM option but all of these drives tend to be slower than fairly cheap desktop drives.

I've seen throughput on a 5400 RPM notebook drive with 8 MB cach in the 430 MB/Sec range with USB 2.0 when I was ghosting an image from one drive to another.

I have a few extra notebook drives at 30 and 40 GB and one I use as a build disk for a laptop. Cuts down on the internal heat in the laptop and performance of desktop apps is much better when you're not chewing up the internal drive.

External drives could be used to store things on like
MP3s or images but you have to remember to go looking for them in another place.

They can be useful for backup drives too for email, mp3s, images, etc. Or for moving stuff from one computer to another.
 
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external drive

External drives are good to store things on like
MP3s or Images, i have'nt did anything else with mine.

I basically treat it as a dumping ground for keeping stuff
off the main HD


regards
 
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If I had an external drive Id back up my HD.
Just a thought.....
 
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I have a Seagate 300 GB external drive. It works great with both my PC and my Powerbook. I use it for video projects and big files that I need to transfer between college and home that are too big for my 1GB Jumpdrive.
 

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