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How much does an External FW drive help a PB?

R

rschapel

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 5, 2004
44
0
I was working on some video the other day on my powerbook, and I imported them into idvd, and started the burn process. First it had to do a number of steps before it actually moved to the "burn" phase, during this time the hardrive was running hard the entire time. Would buying an extrernal FW800 drive help in this processes? What I am guessing its doing during this time is moving and converting the imported imovies, do people typically find the G4 (and its 167bus, a 1.25 CPU in this case) being the limting factor or the hardrive. Also if it is the hardrive (which I am suspecting) how much faster would the process get with the external drive?

Thanks for any info!
 
hotwire132002

hotwire132002

macrumors 65816
Jan 24, 2004
1,209
1
Cadillac, MI
What the Powerbook is doing is compressing the DV video into MPEG-2. It's a very slow process, and the faster the processor, the faster the encode. I usually leave my computer on overnight and let it do the MPEG encodes then. The reason the hard drive is running is the computer is reading the DV file and writing the MPEG.

The best bet to speed this up is a faster processor, a new hard drive wouldn't help much at all. However, you're not going to get much faster than your PowerBook unless you get a G5.
 
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