external harddrive performance

[craigdeguz]

hey all,

i just got the western digital my book and i was wondering the performance of running programs off an external hard drive?

how does it compare running a program or a game from an external harddrive vs an internal one?

thanks

 

[Madwand]

There's going to be some loss going through a USB2 / Firewire 400 interface. How much depends somewhat on the quality of the enclosure and your USB2 / Firewire implementation and your drive speed. How much this affects a given application depends on a number of complex factors..

But for straight-ahead sequential access, the effects can be seen fairly simply. For example, here's a comparison of the same drive through a not-so-great USB2 implementation, compared with a direct PATA interface: