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Performance issues booting from external HD?
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Olympia, WA
Status:
Offline
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I'm on an iMac right now, and will be switching to an Intel Powermac whenever they come out, but I need more storage now. I'm reluctant to replace the internal drive on my iMac because it's not ATA, so I'm going to go for an external drive. My question is, would there be any noticeable decrease in performance while booting from a FireWire or USB 2.0 drive, most likely a 7200 RPM?
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Sydney, Australia
Status:
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Yes, Firewire and USB2 are both slower than the ATA bus in the iMac G4, and slower than the peak speed of the hard drive. However, Firewire 400 is bareable unless you need fast speeds for digital video or some such. Firewire 400 can give you nearly 40MegaBytes/second speed. If you are using a G3 iMac, then you won't notice any speed difference.
Firewire is /much/ faster than USB2, about 4x the speed for large files.
If you have a G5 iMac, then you could upgrade to a larger SATA drive and move that drive into the new Intel Power Mac when it arrives. However you would have the problem of how to move your existing data to a new SATA drive. A friend with a PowerMac G5 could solve this problem (indeed anyone with a Mac or external drive big enough to keep your data on could help out).
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Power Mac G4 Digital Audio 533MHz 1.5GiB RAM, 2x 80Gb ATA HDDs, 320Gb SATA HDD, Radeon 9650 256MiB, Airport Extreme compatible PCI card, Zip 250, Pioneer 110, Firewire DVD burner, 21" CRT, Harmon Kardon Apple Pro Speakers, OS X 10.4.6
Powerbook Pismo G3 400MHz, 768MiB RAM, 80Gb HDD, AirPort Extreme PC Card, Bluetooth 1.1, DVD-ROM, OS X 10.4.6, Ubuntu 5.10, MacOS 9.2.2
To buy: RAM for Pismo, CPU upgrades
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