Da11y Posted January 17, 2008 Share Posted January 17, 2008 Hello, I've got Leopard successfully running on my external HDD and got most of the essentials to work such as graphics, sound, LAN etc. I've realized that I hardly use windows anymore which is installed on my internal HDD. I was curious that are there any disadvantages of running Leopard on an external HDD in terms of speed and performance and whether I should just install windows on my external HDD and Leopard on my internal HDD? Any advice will be appreciated. Thx in advance Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zuz_242 Posted January 17, 2008 Share Posted January 17, 2008 i just got leopard running on my external hd as well. speed seems ok (120 points at xbench), multiboot is done by bios boot menue at the moment. im not sure if i ever switch my priority from xp to osx as i got win nicely customized but i´m considering it. i doubt if xp would run really smooth on an external hd, but i havnt tried . could you transfer your hd / partition internal? i will, as i expect more speed with ata than usb2. for me the external hd is a easy and safe method to start experimenting (after vmware), but not for a running system. as adivice: try it. take an image/clone of your os partitions, so u wont loose anything. ps: i´m interested in further adivces as well ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MiJKa Posted January 17, 2008 Share Posted January 17, 2008 Well, to be fair, I haven't actually timed (well, or benched for that matter) the results, but I've used an external USB drive to test Leopard on a number of laptop and desktop PCs. The installation is significantly slower. I mean, we're talking up to double the time. (Post installation) Boot time is also greatly lengthened. Generally, all features that require disk access are slowed down. Mounting, writing, (obviously) transferring to or from the (external) Leopard drive from or to internal drives... While it's workable, at times it feels like your entire system is slower by an order of magnitude. (To clear this up aforehand, it's a pretty decently quick Seagate 120GB FreeAgent Drive, so the lag due to USB-ness could be MUCH worse.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Da11y Posted January 17, 2008 Author Share Posted January 17, 2008 Cheers for the info MikJa, I also thought the installation was very slow on an external HDD and boot up also seems to take quite some while. I might just install Leopard on my internal HDD and install windows on the other then. I only use windows for very few applications anyways so it should be alright. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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