external hard drive....better?

[lordhutt]

I buddy of mine asked about adding an external hard drive on his pc. I asked him why he didnt just get an internal and he said he was told that it would be better for video editing software to be used on an external as it wont affect the pc's performance.

I have never heard of anything like this....is there any truth to this?

I thought when editing you should have your files on one drive and then edit them on to a second one....maybe that is what he meant??

[waheed]

You're right. It should be a second internal drive, not external. External is limited by speed, hence performance. External are usually in the form of USB 2.0 and Firewire which are 480Mbps and 400Mbps respectively, much much slower in performance than an internal drive.

Unless the external is SATA drive and uses a SATA connection, dont bother with external drive for video editing.

[ofbarea]

Another option is to use an external firewire 800 disk. You will also need a firewire 800 card.

[Treebeard]

External drives are good for a couple things. If the drive is gonna stay connected to the desktop permanetly it should be internal.

external good for:
- data backup to be taken to off site storage
- transferring large volume of data b/w sites