firewire HDD and laptop

[kimchicowboy]

ok, so you know how laptop HDDs are mother slow? if i hooked up like a one of them WD 8MB cache 7200RPM drives to an external firewire hookup thing and attached it to my laptop, would it be much better? and can i use that to run winXP? just popping out some questions. thanks!

[Joshua]

OK dude. let me start off by saying that you're insane.

Now, my take on it... It will totally depend on your laptop on whether it will boot off of an external HD. Would you really want to do that knowing that anytime you wanted to bring the laptop somewhere, you'd have to lug the HD with you??

I don't know how much faster external firewire would be than a slower RPM internal HD. In my experience, anything external other than SCSI is always slower than an internal solution..

If you DO try it, please let me know how it goes speed wise, as I don't have any experience with an external firewire drive and would LOVE to know...

P.S. USB 2.0 is right up there with fire wire these day and I have a feeling the next release of USB will pass it.

[ray]

usb2.0 is indeed faster than firewire.

[kimchicowboy]

oh, ok. i don't have any experience with external devices. just trying to learn. so would you recommend i use usb 2.0 for CD-RW too? i have an inspiron 4100, 866 Mhz P-3. it's when i move away, i only plan on taking my laptop which doesn't have a CD-RW.

[johnnymk]

I use a CardBus Adaptec SlimSCSI 1480A on my laptop to burn on the fly with my 8X burner. The transfer rate is rather good. I am not sure about hard drive performance, though.