[iranfromthezoo]

Okay guys i have a ibook and love it. Well I loaded halo on it and i noticed that it runs, well sluggish. I also run alot of photoshop, download alot of music on my computer. I was wondering if I get a external hard drive and move everything to it would it allow halo and other games run faster? I do have a 60 gig HD and 512 MB of memory.

[Krusty]

Hard to say exactly. A fast, full-sized hard drive will definitely be faster than what is in your iBook. However, there will be a speed bottleneck though your firewire or USB 2.0 port that may make the external's actual performance no better than your internal drive.

An external Firewire drive will honestly max out somewhere between 30-35MB/sec due to the limitations of the Firewire bus. Run Xbench or something on your iBook's internal drive and see how it compares.

[iranfromthezoo]

okay thanks for the information but what is xbench

[darthslacker]

Get Xbench here.

It is a benchmarking program. Download, install and run. Take note of the Disk Test results. They should give you a pretty good idea of the speed of your current internal drive that you can compare to the speeds listed above for a firewire drive.

[fulmer]

what are the specs on your ibook? Processor type and speed, RAM?

[iranfromthezoo]

I have a 1.33 ghz G4 processor with 512 MB ram and 60 gig HD, i believe 32 mb of video memory

[Krusty]

Originally posted by iranfromthezoo:
I have a 1.33 ghz G4 processor with 512 MB ram and 60 gig HD, i believe 32 mb of video memory

Well, perusing the xBench results of others, I see that 1.33 ghz iBooks w/60gb hard drive have disk speeds in the range of 20-29MB/sec depending on the hard drive model. I'd say that if your 60gigger scores in the 20 range, then you'd really benefit from and external drive. If your HD scores in the 29 range, then you probably wouldn't notice too much from a speed perspective. Just download xBench and run just the disk test if you want ... that should tell the tale.