Internal vs external HD - which to buy?

[c23roo]

I have a PM Quad 2.5, with 2.5 Ghz of RAM, 500GB HD, and am looking to add a HD, basically for backup purposes (many video files, many images, many songs, etc...).

What are the relative merits of adding an external vs another internal HD? Is there really much difference between the two, apart from cluttering up my desk some more?

Thanks -

 

[wchong]

internal should be faster (there are no extra wires for information to travel) but it is harder to transfer from one system to the next.

external is more "mobile" yet it suffers from bottlenecking imo. it also takes up space like you said.

if you don't have to move it around just get an internal hd.

 

[pengu]

a "backup" is best on an external drive. if it is ur sole Backup, get a hardware RAID1 external drive (lacie and others offer this) and with Firewire you shouldnt have much of an issue. backups should be running when the system has the least activity (ie overnight) so super-high throughput isnt going to be a huge issue.

dont forget to test your backups every so often. my previous employer (a state government in australia) had HUGE issues with enterprise backups that EDS managed. "warnings" all the time (like thousands of errors per night, per location) but these were usually not noticed/announced until we asked for a restore, and it couldnt be done.