External hard drives, do they slow your laptop up?

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I am desperate for memory and was thinking in terms of a 500 gig external hard drive but my better half who knows far more than me about computers has painted this dark apocolyptic picture of all the life blood being sucked out of my little laptop whenever it is hooked up to this massive external brain. Is she right or just scaring me out of spending money? Any advice, warnings or encouragement would be much appreciated.

Cheers Paul
 
You are doing the typical mixing up of hard drive (storage space) with RAM (memory) thing....

An external drive when plugged into a computer will not slow the computer down BUT if the computer is reading and writing to the external drive this will be slower than reading and writing to an internal drive.
 
No I'm no expert and can only speak from experience. But I have a 500gb external HD which i normally use attached to my PS3 to store photos, music and videos on.

Occasionally to add things to it, or mess about with photos on Gimp, I connect it to my laptop. I have not noticed any slowing down of my laptop while I do this. However I emphasie it is rarely connected to my laptop and when it is, i'm only ever runnning 1 program at a time.

Hope this helps in some way.
 
Sorry for the confusion Cowasaki , yes I do mean storage space rather than memory
 
A USB2 external hard drive can be as fast as an internal. Indeed it may be faster than an internal 5400rpm laptop drive but will certainly be outgunned by a dual 7200rpm SATA RAID0 pair. You shouldn't notice any difference in your laptops performance.
 
should not make any difference
I have 8 external drives connected by firewire 800 very fast
 
chrisgeary said:
A USB2 external hard drive can be as fast as an internal. Indeed it may be faster than an internal 5400rpm laptop drive
Click to expand...
Shurely shome mishtake? USB2 external drives will always be slower than internal drives, because the data travels down a USB cable very, very slowly. You'll be lucky to get 40 MB/s. Compare that to SATA I - 187 MB/s or SATA II - 375 MB/s.

cowasaki said:
if the computer is reading and writing to the external drive this will be slower than reading and writing to an internal drive.
Click to expand...

Unless you stick the external drive on an eSATA interface - then it'll be similar to, or faster than, internal drive speeds.

I have four disks on my laptop -

External WD USB2 (1 TB) - 30 MB/s
Internal WD SATA (500 GB) - 70 MB/s
External Seagate eSATA (1.5 TB) - 100 MB/s
Internal Intel X-25M SATA (160 GB) - 225 MB/s

Data from HD Tune 2.55 benchmarks. I guess the internal drive is slower because it's 5400 rpm as opposed to the 7200 rpm of the external.
 
hollis_f said:
Unless you stick the external drive on an eSATA interface - then it'll be similar to, or faster than, internal drive speeds.
Click to expand...

clearly but we were talking about USB. Esata is basically just shielded sata so it's the same speed as it would be inside. That wasn't the question though!
 
cowasaki said:
clearly but we were talking about USB. Esata is basically just shielded sata so it's the same speed as it would be inside. That wasn't the question though!
Click to expand...

Well, no - nobody mentioned USB until post #7; it was just assumed that the OP was talking about a USB drive (and it's probably a fair assumption). I was just trying to point out that other options, faster than USB2, are available with none of its disadvantages.
 
I have an Ixos 500gb external hard drive - when it's connected to the laptop, there is no difference I can notice.

I just use it for dumping the months pics onto - and when I want to trawl through what I've saved.

I would say go for it - it saves your laptop being slowed down by all the pics you've stored (I think I had about 9,000 before I got one) and I'm relieved that my pics are now safe.

I got it from maplins, and from memory, it was about £130?
 
Thanks all I think I'll risk it. I'll let you know if it goes pear shaped.
Cheers Paul
 
hollis_f said:
Shurely shome mishtake? USB2 external drives will always be slower than internal drives, because the data travels down a USB cable very, very slowly. You'll be lucky to get 40 MB/s. Compare that to SATA I - 187 MB/s or SATA II - 375 MB/s.



Unless you stick the external drive on an eSATA interface - then it'll be similar to, or faster than, internal drive speeds.

I have four disks on my laptop -

External WD USB2 (1 TB) - 30 MB/s
Internal WD SATA (500 GB) - 70 MB/s
External Seagate eSATA (1.5 TB) - 100 MB/s
Internal Intel X-25M SATA (160 GB) - 225 MB/s

Data from HD Tune 2.55 benchmarks. I guess the internal drive is slower because it's 5400 rpm as opposed to the 7200 rpm of the external.
Click to expand...

I was referring to older ide 5400rpm 2.5" drives which IME are horrendously slow. Slower than a decent USB2 drive.
 
An external HDD via USB is always going to be much slower than SATA due to the bottleneck throughput of the USB interface. However in general terms, adding a USB drive is certainly not going to slow the laptop as it will only use the hard drive when it needs it.

However.. I would probably recommend disabling indexing for that drive otherwise the operating system (W7 or vista) will be constantly polling the drive during indexing; this may give the impression its slowing the system down while its building the lists.

Anyway all this talk about SATA etc is clearly academic as most HDD throughput is only around 50 meg per second. Nothing is ever really going to come close to SATA's full output though you can try by replacing your hard disk with a SSD drive (think of it as a big memory card) such as the Intel X25M (giving approx 200MB/s) but they come with their own risks such as longevity (lots of issues with putting the paging file on a SSD drive).

Anyway shutting up as I'm starting to bore myself now. :D
 
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