External Hard Drive Usefullness

Yes it can be done, and has been done since the Commodore 64

The connection is important. The fastest is the most expensive.

Will it save you any problems? No

Unfortunately, Whatever is on the external drives is down loaded to run on your computer. Your computer will use its virtual memory on your default drive.

The drive is not the computer, it is only a storage area. Where it is located does not make a difference.

You could introduce problems with the extra connections by disconnecting and reconnecting the cables.

Then you have the other problem. Even the original programs have many errors.

Unless of course you went back to the external drive that came with the Commodore 128 which had its own processor.

Can it be done? Yes.

Will your notebook run more efficiently? No.

All advice that I've received say that programs should be placed on the internal drive (drive C:, in other words). The direct connection means its faster to access than an external drive which has to go through an interface.

The same advice says that data can be place in the external drive. Since data tends to expand, putting it in the C: drive tends to slow down the computer because it has to look for data and run the program from the same drive. If your drive is fragmented, the problem gets worse.

Regular defragmentation is important to keep your PC running at optimum speed. Regular cleaning of unused files and registries is also important. Finally, having a lot of memory really helps a lot.

In short:

• Put your programs in the C: drive
• Put your data in a separate drive, either a separate partition or an external drive.
• Defrag frequently
• Clean frequently
• Install as much memory as you can

Oh, before I forget, save your files to an external drive that you connect and disconnect after saving. An alternative is to burn it into a CD. This way, if your hard drive crashes, you at least have your most recently saved files safe in storage.

No it wont work

Many programs wont run from there

and they wont show up on your

program list

Extra and backup storage; and portability. KISS.

Mr. Guest, you said:

No it wont work

Many programs wont run from there

Your statement needs clarification. "Many programs" mean that some programs will run from the external drive. So, using that premise, Yes, it will work...though not all the time.

When you install a program in another drive, it will usually tell you if it won't run. If it doesn't tell you, it usually will run. Believe me, I've tried installing programs in other drives and they work. And if they won't show up in your program list, its very easy to put them there manually.

Let me be clear on this, however. I don't recommend putting programs in an external drive. If you do, however, it might work but not very efficiently.

I recently upgraded to a 250 gig hard drive. I did partition it to keep documents and program files seperate. The best thing I did was add another gig of ram which sped things up considerably

The Usefulness of an external hard drive in my opinion is immense I have two 300 gig external. This allows me to move very BIG files around. As for data storage I suggest that you NEVER keep data on the same drives that the system is on even if is partitioned. Let me pose this question what happens if the 0 sector of a drive takes a dump? even if is partitioned the hole thing is toast. Ask me how I know this. I suggest if you want an easy way to back up the data go to Microsoft and get the sync toy I have been running for about a year and it works great. As for degfragmenting get diskeeper it is an automatic defragmenter. The default defragmenter was set-up to run when the drive reached 20% fragmentation. This was fine the largest hard drive was 1 gig. Think what 20% of 250 gig hard drive that is a large chunk.

yes you can use external hard drive and its quite useful i have a 40GB external hard drive it seves as a backup for my Laptop and desktop its perticularly use full while traveling you need not carrey your laptop you can hook up to any PC with windows OS and open the files stored on your external harddrive.

Why not use additional Hard disk. It will be much faster to run Internal IDE drives than USB or Firewire devices.

But there are dedicated programs for [USB Sticks on web which may run on USB Drive also but are very limited in number & purpose]

TIP: The advantage of additional drive may also play its part to run your system faster by configuring for Virtual Mem to place Swap-file [pagefile.sys in XP] on the additional drive.

Go to System Properties- > Advanced [Tab] Performance [Settings Button] > Advanced [Tab] Virtual memory > Change [Button] mark "No paging file on [Disk1 & all its partions] & Mark "Custom size" on the 1st partition of [Disk 2]

I think even running programs on Ext Drive; all the temp files [logs etc ] may clutter your Active-drive.

I lost the boot sector on my hard drive and it became worthless... with loss of a couple of years of data.

After replacing the drive (about 130 Gig) and reloading the software I got a 100 Gig drive run through the USB port. I use it ONLY for backup for the internal hard drive. I know that I will run out of room before I run out of space on the internal drive, but I (or the computer) will probably be dead when that happens. FYI it takes about 45 minutes to totally back up the internal hard drive. When not doing a backup, the portable disk is disconnected and stored in a safe place.

Bill