[roders]

Which would be best for HD performance, an internal 7200-rpm laptop HD, or an external Firewire/USB2 desktop 7200 rpm HD???
I'll soon have in my possesion a Core Duo Mac Min @ 1.66Ghz, with 1GB ram and I'll be recording to the HD in Garage band and in the Future LX7.
I'm happy to take the mini apart to instal a HD, but am looking for the best price/performance choice, I'm guessing Sata is much faster than firewire 400, but that an external 3.5" HD with larger cache will be faster, than an internal 7200rpm laptop/2.5" drive?.

[mduell]

External, FW400 is fastest.

Even ATA100 is much faster than Firewire.

A 3.5" drive is much faster than 2.5".

[roders]

I appreciate the reply but I dont think it's really answered my question;
I know a standard desktop HD will be faster than a standard (4200 or in the Mini's case 5400rpm) Laptop HD, but I would install a 2.5" Laptop HD with a rotantional speed of 7200rpm (the rotational speed of fast desktop/3.5" HD's).
I know firewire should be a bit faster than USB2 on the Mac (and prob vice versa on the PC) but it's really the 7200rpm laptop/2.5" Vs desktop/3.5" HD performance difference that I'm asking about, and that if a desktop/3.5 is external, does a firewire 400 or USB2 connection negate any speed advantage a full size external HD would have, if the internal/laptop/2.5" drive was 7200rpm and connected via Sata???

[mduell]

Despite the bottleneck of FW400, the 3.5" 7200RPM external disk will still be faster than the internal 2.5" 7200RPM.

The internal 2.5" disk is hampered by the speed of the disk; SATA has a lot of excess bandwidth capacity.
The external 3.5" disk is hampered by the speed of the interconnect (FW400 in this case); the disk has excess bandwidth capacity.