advice - MacbookPro early '08, eSATA, external hard drive, boot camp & flight sim

[VHOJT]

Hi there guys

I must say I have stalked these forums for a little while now, and they have solved a couple of past problems of mine by finding them on Google.

The questions I have is:

I presently run Flight Simulator on my internal HD in my early '08 Macbook pro (the last of the "silver" models I believe, and of the dearest matt screen! Bought it in May 2008 anyway), and it goes very nicely. Flight Simulator is a continually expanding enterprise, however, and I would dearly like to be able to one day run it off an external hard drive I have bought a few months ago. The external hard drive is in a case that supports eSATA I am aware there are various cards around the place for eSATA for the Macbook Pro, my questions are, for anyone who knows:

- do they work correctly under Bootcamp and Windows XP?
- will the performance be the essentially identical to an internal hard-drive, such that I will be able to run a fairly demanding game from them without too much trouble?
- are there any slow downs (i.e. the card itself, the port on the Macbook Pro etc.)
- are some cards, cables etc. better than others?

I believe the hard drive I bought is up to the task, it's just a matter of the connection the Macbook, especially under Windows.

I have searched around - but this is a fairly specific question I suppose.

Does anyone have any advice or experience?

Thanks for any help you could offer!
VH

 

[feuerschlange]

I am very interested in this topic too.

With my last hdd upgrade of my Penryn MBP, I forgot to test this.

I will have some external testing with Firewire 800 later on and will post comments.

Ideal would be, to have the entire bootcamp installation on the external drive, as I only use the bootcamp install for gaming at home.