External HD question

[tribe3]

Please excuse me if this has being discussed to death.

My question is: Will my computer run faster if I boot from an external 7200rpm HD compared to the stock HD on my 15” Powerbook? If yes; faster doing what kind of stuff?

Thanks

 

[PlaceofDis]

the difference won't be noticable at all.

booting from a FW is possible, and even though the RPM will be faster on the External, you still deal with the bottleneck of FW. its only so fast. i booted off of an External drive for about a year with my 12" powerbook, it wasn't any slower or faster in real life usage. FW is faster than USB would ever be, sure, but you won't be able to gain anything out of it even with a faster drive because its still slower than the standard hard drive connection. you might notice a small speed increase if you were to put a faster drive into the powerbook though.

 

[CoMpX]

Access times will be faster because it is a faster spinning hard drive. The thing is, it's not like it's worlds faster or anything, a few seconds maybe. And besides, the PowerBook is a portable and if you have the system software on the external, you will always need to have the external with you in order to boot your machine.

 

[grapes911]

It will be faster if you are doing things that require a lot of hard drive access.

Example: If you are editing a video that is too big for RAM and at least some of it is being swapped out to the hard drive, then you'll notice a difference.

The average email / web user probably won't notice a difference.

 

[tribe3]

Thanks for the answers
I just got a FW Lacie (a square box with a little light designed by Porsche?? ) and I installed Tiger in a partition. I'll see how it performs with iPhoto loaded with all my pictures and just keep a smaller number of them on the PB.

Thanks again

 

[frankblundt]

this comparison of mini internal stock drives against firewire externals shows a big difference between some options, depending on what you're doing.