External Hard drive...Advice needed 3

[AngelNicest]

My hard drive just crashed. I want to buy a new one but my pc is old i don't know how much longer i'm going to use it...right now all i can afford is to buy a Hard drive.

Can I buy an external drive and use it as the only drive in my computer? If yes, what are the pros and cons?

I would appreciate your advice. Thank You.

livesfreely

 

[LloydSev]

Your BIOS would explicitly have to allow for this.

The biggest CON is that you are limited to the 66MB/s of USB2.0, which is shared bandwidth between all devices on that bus.

Generally, newer HDD are ATA 100 or better, so they run at 100 MB/s. Much faster.

Plus external HDD are more expensive.

Computer/Network Technician
CCNA

 

[jimp56]

IMO i would say no. even if the pc allowed t, i am not sure that windows would install (assuming thats your O/S) - and performance as said above would be very disappointing compared to a modern internal drive.

 

[micker377]

It will be easier to replace the hard drive IN the computer, than to set up an external drive. When you do get a new computer, this hard drive can be used as a "data" (secondary) disk.

 

[ltgpyl]

Hi all,

I need help.

I am running Win XP on my P3 700Mhz Sony laptop.

I don't have many applcation softwares on it. Just a few standard ones. (e.g., IE, MSOffice, McCafee Anti Virus, etc)
I only used up 10G in my laptop.

I came acoss this problem recently.

The startup time promting passwd is quick. Once I login, the response time is really slow and I can hear my HD working very hard like it is searching for some thing.

It took like 3 min for me to open a window/software and the HD is constantly running. I have tried defrag, scan viruses, MSConfig and closing all the programs after start up and the problem still exists.

Shutting down also takes long time like 10 min or so.
It is trying to safe my setting.

My profile is about 3.5MB and I think it is quite large!
How can I clean up my profile?

I don't know what to do and it really drives me crazy.

Please help.

Thanks

 

[micker377]

ltgpyl:

This should be posted as a new thread. It's hard to reply to two different problems in one post.