External Hard Drive Question ???

[ofield]

Hi, this is my first post. I have just recieved a Iomega 7200rpm 320Gb External Hard Drive. My question is should I install my new programs on it or on my internal 80Gb drive?

Also how do I back up my system to my external drive in case my internal malfunctions or crashes, etc. My external drive did not come with any software.

Any Help Would be Great......

[salehin]

Use the internal one...

I hope they're giving you 5 yr warranty... If not then try to get hold of one that provides such long warranty.

If you can't find an external one (, Seagate does it in Europe,) with 5 yrs wrnty at relatively cheaper price, then buy an internal one (Seagate) and a caddy (with USB2, FOREWIRE, and/or, eSata connection and good ventilation). I hope I'm not upsetting you in anyway.

[wilmac]

Also how do I back up my system to my external drive in case my internal malfunctions or crashes, etc. My external drive did not come with any software.

Any Help Would be Great......

Hi,

Plug the new drive up and power on, open "my computer" and you should see the new drive alongside your old one, right click on it and format it as an empty drive, now you can cut and paste/drag and drop everything you want to keep from the old drive to the new drive.

Hope this helps.

[Ar3d]

yes use the internal one... actually using a big harddrive for OS can also cause a slow to your PC. actually based on my experienced, its much better to use a small amount of harddrive that will exact to your OS.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Not sure how you figure that. A larger hard drive means higher density (particulary in the outer tracks) which means higher speed. I don't know how it could be slower...

~Misfit

[JohnnyMalaria]

Use the internal one - it's a LOT faster than the external one.

[CWR03]

I personally would never install programs on an external drive, but instead would use it only for storage. If you ever need to boot the PC without the external drive, you'll either get errors or it may not boot at all.

[foxyshadis]

eSata or Firewire external can easily be at full rated speed (70-90 MB/s). USB will rarely get over 40 MB/s, ethernet is simply laughable, good luck getting even 7 MB/s over a 10/100 samba drive. (You can get 30-40 out of gigabit but it uses insane amounts of cpu on the host system.)

You wouldn't want to run a database on an external, but they're plenty fast enough for audio/video working files.

[Shinigami-Sama]

I 'install' standalone programs on external drives
like cdex, imgburn, ect...
but ones that use the registry or like to start on boot always on the same partition as the OS

to bad windows still fails with partitions, the mountpoints are laughable at best