Does anyone boot from an external HDD on here? My old imac g4 has a bad drive and alot of people suggested to boot from a firewire drive because of the difficulty installing a new one. I was curious if it slows the system down alot? I only plan on using it for the basics... web, word processing, keep my music and photos.
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anyone boot from external drive?
- Thread starter osufnl499
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if it's the older G4 iMac (7/800) i think the stock drives are 5400rpm, in which case running it off an external (most likely 7200rpm) drive will actually speed your system up, if it's a later one i don't think there's that much in it to worry about either way.
osufnl499 said:
It can be done but i dont suggest doing it all the time or as a "work around" for the one that is dead. My suggestion is to just replace the one that is in there. This could be a good excuse to install a bigger drive also!!
I have. I don't know what rpm my iMac (1 GHz) is but my external is 7200 with 8 MB cache and I've booted a few times (to my PB backup on my iMac) and I haven't noticed anything being slower nor faster, but I wasn't really looking attentively at the speed. Can't wait for something to go drastically wrong inside (as long as that something is either my HD or optical drive, as I want to upgrade both of them, but don't really want to do it until I have to)osufnl499 said:
No I don't think there is any speed gain from a faster external drive. Has to do with the firewire or usb connection, though I'd think firewire would be faster.