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Internal VS External Hard drives, HALP

1K views 8 replies 5 participants last post by  Compiler 
#1 ·
Alright so my setup is a 320GB Internal drive with nothing but Vista on it, and then I have a 500gb MyBook External which has everything on it including games, applications, music, etc. I was talking to some guys who were saying you really shouldn't run things like games and applications off external hard drives and it can ruin them and overall make everything you're running off it go slower as opposed to just having them on an internal.

So what do you guys think? Should I keep my set up how it is or should I put everything on the internal? (Except back up)

Thanks for any replies.
 
#2 ·
eSATA is a little to a lot faster but otherwise, yes you are limited by the USB or Firewire bus speed and when it comes to apps and games loading from them, that = slower load times. It won't ruin them in any way that I can think of unless there's a break in the connection, and having an external makes it more likely for that to occur, but nothing inherently more dangerous than that.
 
#5 ·
A good question would be why you'd use a 320GB drive only for an operating system? The external drive is certainly slower than the internal one. Another question would be where do you back up your data? Do you have another external drive for that?
I figured this way there was no risk of losing anything if the OS gave up or something. Since then I've realized I probably could have just partitioned the internal, but never thought it'd be worth the effort.

Also, I'm confused, I was always under the impression that externals were faster? don't they have a transfer rate of 300mbs or something? While internals have a max of 150?
 
#6 ·
Sounds like you're suffering several false impressions. USB and Firewire externals are more like 30 MB/s transfer at best and can be significantly slower than that for USB since all USB devices on the same controller must share the bandwidth.

Also you risk losing your stuff no matter where it is without a backup. When a hard drive dies, it dies, and it can just as easily die in an external as internal. In fact its even more vulnerable as an external to accidental sudden G-force damage as well as disconnecting during a critical write operation.
 
#9 ·
Also, when compared to a desktop computer - the cooling system of an external drive is not there.

External drives primary function is to store lots of data for transfer or backup. If there is a fire and you can't grab all your computers - at least grab the external drives.

Any drive can fail at any time.

And going over USB is horribly slow. USB 3.0 is a lot faster... there are no computers on the market with USB 3.0 at this time, until 2010... nor are there any USB 3/0 external drives.
 
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