Well, right now i am kinda bent on buy an external hard drive with at least 200gb of storage. my main use is for partitioning for os's. but i have two questions 1. What will happen if i use an external hard drive to run different os's? and is speed going to be a problem because of usb? 2. What is the best brand of external hard drive out there?

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for your first question, yes, you will see a majore decrease in loading times and lag; however, I don't think it will render the OS unusable. If you can, i would suggest using firewire, but if your computer doesn't support it, then you'll have to deal with USB. As for brands, I have no idea, sorry.

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Internal hard drive brands will most likely make the same quality external products. I'd say go for Western Digital, they have never failed me before whereas I hear stories of other people loosing their data because their drives fail or stuff like that, nothing along those lines happened to me. They are usually slightly more expensive then other brands, but are way worth it.

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Ya, I've heard a lot of things about external hard drives. I wouldn't know much cause i have never used them. But i was told that they allow your computer to be a lot faster if you save everything to it.

First Question: I do not know about the operating systems, but i do know it will make your computer run faster.

Second Question: Like i said i have never used any. But probably any good computer brand that would make external hard drives. Or just go to Best Buy and ask someone there. They are bound to know.

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What I have heard is that it would be faster to have your partitions on your local hard drive (the one in the computer), and all your other things such as mp3's and files on the external Hard Drive. And keep them defragmented.

Also, firewire would be a lot better, even though usb is supposed to be faster, its not because firewire has more bandwidth.

I have a usb external drive, and it works good. No problems, it all depends what you are going to be doing, like recording audio would need an external firewire drive.

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Well, my dad uses his external for music, but i want to be able to move the os's to different computers (because i have many) and it would be convinient. and the good thing is 2 are mac, so firewire is a given. and for my dell, i will just get a firewire adapter thing.

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I find it very unlikely that it will work the fact is that if you use external hard drive some connections are slower then other and I think that if you use usb then it will probably not work however you could use e SATA it is quite fast and it may work for you.

However for the overall I would suggest using the WD MyBook Premium ES Edition WDG1SU5000E


it is in my oppinion the best overall external hard drive with the price of about 0.5 euros for one giga byte. and its size is the 500 GB however the real size is some 465GB.

In my very personal opinion this is best external hard drive although it just supports USB 2.0 and e SATA connectors and it does not support the USB power so it has to have external source of energy. I intend to buy for me.

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USB OSbootable HDDS are not a very wise option because of the leg and sometimes the os wont install properly so if you want to run another os try buying another internal hdd

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