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jimndeb · Oct 5, 2007, 03:27 PM

I just "switched" and am an owner of MBP with 110 Gigs of available space.
One of the first things I noticed is that the footprint of OS X is quite large after installing a bunch of new apps, putting my music and photo collection on the hard disk I started to worry about space.

I have multiple external hard drives for back ups and storage but I want regular and immediate access to photos, files, and music so I've ruled out storing things on external drives because they are not always on.

I have created a bootable backup on one of these drives however, and I started wondering...

Can I create multiple bootable back up partitions and then customize them for particular tasks and just boot from those external partitions whenever I need to engage in a particular task?

For example I would create fresh OSX image on an external partiton and install Adobe Create Suite (which takes up some space). Then when I needed to use Photoshop or Illustrator I can plug in that drive, boot from it and work as usual. I can still access the MBP drive for files and other applications.
I'm thinking of making another external partition for my windows virtual machine which also takes up lots of space.

Is there going to be a significant performance hit from running the OS over USB 2 or Firewire?
Are there other concerns?

Am I thinking about this wrong? for example would it be easier to install apps to eternal partitions and run from there? Do the apps need to be on the same partition as all the pref files and the OS or does it matter at all.

Thanks for helping out the mac newb

Is there going to be a significant pref

Cold Warrior · Oct 5, 2007, 03:40 PM

fw 800 and even fw 400 would be better than USB 2.0. The former two have better sustained transfer rates.

jimndeb · Oct 5, 2007, 03:43 PM

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior

fw 800 and even fw 400 would be better than USB 2.0. The former two have better sustained transfer rates.

I haven't found a FW 800 external drive but They must be out there.

But using the external drives as boot drives for a laptop is not any sort of problem (transfer rates not withstanding)?

~bash $ · Oct 5, 2007, 07:21 PM

At some point, you'll be booting off of that external drive and the connection for whatever reason will be lost, and a lot will be prone to breaking. I wouldn't do it, personally. Much better to leave files to that than the entire OS.