added 120g external have q's

dawson77dawson77
edited January 2005 in Hardware
I am dealing with an old system and low budget only had 10g so added 120g external but now it is a lot slower. can I put every file in the external and make it my main drive? If so can someone help me do this I haven't found a way to switch which drive is the main one. Oh by the way thanks for the aim5.5 advice and how to get rid of wild tangent worked like a charm.

Comments

  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited December 2004
    Well since it's an external drive and an older system I'm assuming it's probably just connecting through usb1 or usb2 if you are lucky and not firewire. Usb is so much slower then your internal ide connection which is why you are experiencing the slow downs. Even running it off firewire would be slower compared to your regular ide channel. External drives are primarily for storying data and not as a main opperating drive.

    Now as for making it your primary not sure exactly what you mean? If you mean having it stay external and be the primary drive they you are probably out of luck. Some newer mobos will allow you to boot off a usb device but I'm guess yours won't allow you to do that. Not to mention that your system would probably be even slower then it is now. Your other option is that you can probably open up the external case and pull the hdd out of it, as more often then not they are just normal harddrives in a casing. You could then drop that into your system as the main device on the ide channel. But I wouldn't recomend going that route. You are better off just buying a fast 40 - 80 gig hard drive for the machine and using it. Save the external and use it as intended.
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited December 2004
    If you don't have usb 2.0 you can also add a usb 2.0 pci card for ten bucks or so.
  • dawson77dawson77
    edited January 2005
    kryyst wrote:
    Well since it's an external drive and an older system I'm assuming it's probably just connecting through usb1 or usb2 if you are lucky and not firewire. Usb is so much slower then your internal ide connection which is why you are experiencing the slow downs. Even running it off firewire would be slower compared to your regular ide channel. External drives are primarily for storying data and not as a main opperating drive.

    Now as for making it your primary not sure exactly what you mean? If you mean having it stay external and be the primary drive they you are probably out of luck. Some newer mobos will allow you to boot off a usb device but I'm guess yours won't allow you to do that. Not to mention that your system would probably be even slower then it is now. Your other option is that you can probably open up the external case and pull the hdd out of it, as more often then not they are just normal harddrives in a casing. You could then drop that into your system as the main device on the ide channel. But I wouldn't recomend going that route. You are better off just buying a fast 40 - 80 gig hard drive for the machine and using it. Save the external and use it as intended.


    ok what steps do i take to pull it out and replace the 10g drive can i transfer the info on the 10g to the 120g external first so that i won't have to re install everything and will the pre programmed driver in the 120g still work internally or will i have to download new one
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited January 2005
    you have to get a newer version of Norton Ghost that will allow you to ghost the data from your 10gig to your usb drive. That will completely replace the data on the 120gig drive with that of the 10gig so anything on it will be lost. Then for the swap you'd have to take appart the casing of the USB drive and just look to see if it's a full size hdd or a mini-hdd. If it's a full size normal hdd then you simply plug it in where your current 10gig is. If it's a mini-hdd then you are out of luck.

    If the shell that the USB drive is in is glued together then I wouldn't recomend pulling it appart.

    Truthfully though -and I'm not sure what your budget is like- but hdd's are pretty cheap right now so I'd actually just recomend going out and buying one and leaving your usb drive as is. It's always very handy to have a usb drive for backups.
  • dawson77dawson77
    edited January 2005
    ok thanks for the help
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