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    Help choosing an external drive and some questions...

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by nycfly89, Nov 17, 2007.

  1. nycfly89

    nycfly89 Notebook Geek

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    Hey guys,
    well i'm a 4 month mac owner and i couldn't be more satisfied!! i will own a macbook forever! now i need some help with external hard drives.
    which ones do you recommend for a reasonable price? i'm currently looking at two of them
    a western digital 250gb passport portable hard drive and
    a western digital 500gb mybook hard drive

    now.. which ones do you think will fit my needs? i basically would like to backup all of my files and even was wondering if it's possible to put windows vista on that? or even install games onto it and play it from the hard drive??
    i know that the mybook has a firewire port. is that better than usb?? because the firewire is not offered on the smaller portable drive. i kind of like the portable drive because i can bring it with me on the plane since i travel a lot and if i have installed games or windows on it (if thats even possible??), then it would be worth it.

    you all have been so helpful to me on here and i thank you all in advance!!
     
    nycfly89, Nov 17, 2007
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  2. sulkorp

    sulkorp Notebook Deity

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    I'm not sure how gaming will be off of a usb/firewire drive. I'd think if its any newer game, or even most older ones, you'd suffer real performance problems.

    Looks like you have a mbp? (cause of sig) I dunno if the macbook has an expansion port, but with mbp you can get an esata adapter. That along with an external case with esata will make the drive like an internal one, and if you get one thats 7200rpm, it will perform even better then one that's internal. That's what im doing to play all my games in windows, and it works really well.
     
    sulkorp, Nov 17, 2007
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  3. Sam

    Sam Notebook Virtuoso

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    Firewire 400 has a faster transfer rate than USB 2.0, so if you can find a Firewire drive, go for it! Worth noting that not as many notebooks and desktops have Firewire ports compared to USB 2.0 ports though, so if you plan to use the external hard drive between many computers make sure they all have Firewire ports.
     
    Sam, Nov 17, 2007
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  4. Budding

    Budding Notebook Virtuoso

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    Gaming off Firewire or USB will be fine. If you are planning to play your games in a VM, then you can create the partition for the VM on your external drive and run it off there. If you are planning on gaming via Boot Camp, then you will either have to get the Firewire drive and put your Windows partition on your external, or partition your external with a FAT32 or NTFS partition to install your games on, as you cannot boot Windows via Boot Camp from a USB device.
     
    Budding, Nov 17, 2007
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