Internal or External Drive - Advantages and Disadvantages

[Muttster]

I am getting a G5 1.8 Powermac tomorrow that has two HD's that are 75 gb each. In will need more storage space so i was wondering whether I should replalce one of the hard drives with either an internal or external drive. The questions that I have are:

1. Will I take a major performance hit if I go with an external firewire drive over an internal drive.

2. I know I need a serial drive SATA instead of other drives. Do I have the same limitations if I go with an external drive or can I buy any raw drive and put it into an enclosure.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

 

[crazycat]

I am getting a G5 1.8 Powermac tomorrow that has two HD's that are 75 meg each. In will need more storage space so i was wondering whether I should replalce one of the hard drives with either an internal or external drive. The questions that I have are:

75 gigs of space is way to little in the digital age, look at getting atleast 500 GB if you do any video editing or download video.

Edited: I like external hard drives more, you can always move them around and use them for other computers.

1. Will I take a major performance hit if I go with an external firewire drive over an internal drive.

usb1 is very slow, so is usb2. I will stick with firewire 800 as its around 6 times faster then firewire 400. I was backing my itunes library onto an external hard drive and it took me like 5 hours every time but after switching to firewire 800 it takes under 1 hour so yes the difference is huge.

2. I know I need a serial drive SATA instead of other drives. Do I have the same limitations if I go with an external drive or can I buy any raw drive and put it into an enclosure.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Not sure on this one.

 

[Porco]

If you're going to be buying a new drive and enclosure you might as well put the new, bigger one internally and benefit from the speed, and put the existing 75GB (I assume you mean GB not "Meg"!) in a Firewire/USB 2 enclosure.

Also be aware some newer drives (WD, maybe others?) use some SATA features that don't work on the G5's SATA controllers... so research the drive you are intending to buy online (I found this to my cost when I bought a Raptor!).