External Hard Drive

[DeadRobot]

I have a back up on my Seagate 320 GB hard drive. I can boot into it from startup and everything works great.

I am wondering if there is any consequence to doing this all the time? Will it be any slower than if I were using my internal hard drive? Will it shrink the life of my external hard drive by using it so much?

 

[PeteB]

It depends how you've connected up the external HDD. If it's a USB link, then yes it's going to be a lot slower accessing data than your internal hard drive.

 

[kastenbrust]

It depends how you connect to your external hard drive, USB 1.0, USB 2.0, FW400, FW800, SATA, ESATA?

All hard drive usage, internal and external reduces the life. Also you should know, internal and external hard drives are basically the same if you take away the fancy casing around an external hard drive, infact their so similar i make my own external hard drives out of internal ones from broken machines, i pick up a $10 case and stick the hard drive inside.

 

[DeadRobot]

Thanks for the quick replies!

Its a Firewire 400. Will that affect the speed at all?

http://www.google.com/products/cata...n&cid=8811536798392058614&sa=title#ps-sellers
Thats the drive

So do you think if i used this permanently (probably 8 hours a day) it will last for at least a year?

 

[DeadRobot]

Anyone?

 

[Benguitar]

So do you think if i used this permanently (probably 8 hours a day) it will last for at least a year?

I think it should be fine if you were to have it running constantly.

I am not 100% on that, but I don't see why it would stop working.

 

[pinoyplaya]

Firewire is slower than SATA but faster than USB so you should be fine.