Internal 7200rpm vs External FW800?

[chazfest]

Anyone care to advise?
Would love to hear any past experiences and direct comparisons etc

Have written off the Momentus XT due to endless reviews of noise, heat and battery zapping. Is this just the way all 7200 internals are likely to perform though?

If so, should I maybe continue using my 5400 internal for apps and os, and buy a FW800 7200rpm for my media?

Oh, I'm using my MBP mainly for video editing (FCP, Motion, Shake) and some audio and graphics too.

 

[jav6454]

Internal is better.

 

[movieboy23]

+1 for internal.

I've got a 500 GB 7200 RPM Hitachi drive in my machine and it's pretty damn quiet (plus when I'm not using it it goes to sleep and I run off my SSD, so my machine is literally silent. You'll be taking better advantage of the read/write times of the drive if you have it hooked up to the logic board via a 3 Gbps SATA connection than if you were to limit it to the Firewire drive's 800 Mbit/s max data transfer speed.

 

[Stvwndr219]

Would you be storing the media files, etc. on the external drive? FWIW, I had no trouble running some media production stuff for high school (FW400 ftw) off of an external drive. At points it will be sluggish, but I prefer the external hard drives as they aren't as finicky as internal drives (I've had some bad experiences with the battery draining, etc.).

Another option, if you're not going to be working with a ton of them open and if the files aren't absurdly large (i.e. 300-400GB) you could copy what you need onto you computer and work on it and keep a backup on the external. That way, if anything were to happen, you would have a backup. Just my 2 cents.

 

[pyroo]

Give Western Digital Scorpio Black a try, it is one of the quietest 7200rpm I've used, but than again, I only have the 7200rpm momentus to compare with.

 

[chazfest]

Thanks for the info guys.
Seems like the move to the 7200 will make all the difference. That said, I'm still unsure after hearing endless 'positive' reviews where they still mention the overheating and added noise, but essentially tell you to 'deal with it' for a trade off for the speed increase etc.

Sounds like it's between the Momentus and the Scorpio Blue/Black right now. Loved the concept of the Momentus XT, but have heard more and more that it takes awhile to catch up with your work flow etc, and if/when you change it significantly, it's back to square one for speed. I need something reliable, that'll let my MBP run reliably too.

I'm starting to think maybe I'll upgrade the internal to a 640gb 5400rpm, mainly for for os, apps, and partial media. Then get a FW800 7200rpm external for my scratch disk and main media. Good idea? Or missing the point?

Also, if/when I get a larger drive, would it be good practice to partition, say, 80gb, solely for Snow Leopard and apps, then use the remaining for files? Or would this simply make no 'real world' difference what so ever?