My hard drive situation

**PhatHam** · 10-25-2006, 11:05 PM

Here's my situation: My home computer is a G4 powerbook with a 60 GB hard drive that is mostly full. For my carputer project I just picked up a laptop with a 40 GB hard drive. I have about 20 GB of mp3s on my powerbook right now, which I'll transfer over to my carputer when ready. I also want to upload dvds to my carupter, and with the 40GB drive there won't be much room after the mp3s, OS, nav, etc. So I'm thinking about an external hard drive, but need some opinions on what I should do. So far these are the options I've come up with:

1. Buy a 80GB or 100GB 2.5 in drive to put in my carputer laptop, get a case for the 40GB and use that as an external drive on my powerbook. The advantage of this setup is the single 80GB internal drive of the laptop should be enough to store everything I need. i.e. no external drive for my carputer setup. The downside is my powerbook only has USB 1 and firewire, so if I use the 40GB drive as a USB drive it'll be slooooooow. Is there a way to use the 40GB 2.5in drive as a firewire drive? Also, I still won't have my powerbook's hard drive backed up.

2. Get a big external USB2.0/Firewire hard drive and share it between the two computers. With something like a 250GB drive I can backup both my powerbook's 60GB drive, the carputer's 40GB drive, and have 150GB left over for porn. This seems like the better option, but there are a few issues that have come to mind. First, file systems. Will both OS X and Win XP be able to "share" the external drive? Second, how will I power the external drive in my car? Third, are there issues with using an external drive that will be powered up and down constantly while in the car?

3. Go baller and buy a bigger internal drive for the carputer AND a big external drive for my powerbook. This is the easy solution but the least cost effective.

**2k1Toaster** · 10-25-2006, 11:13 PM

Yes they make 2.5" enclosures that support firewire. The first I found: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817186201

My suggestion is just leave your PowerBook alone. Put it away except for transfering the files. Then get a spiffy new HD. 3.5" are pretty cheap and for all intents and purposes, they last just as long and the cost per bit is much smaller than a 2.5".

Good luck.

**PhatHam** · 10-26-2006, 11:43 AM

Originally Posted by 2k1Toaster

My suggestion is just leave your PowerBook alone. Put it away except for transfering the files. Then get a spiffy new HD. 3.5" are pretty cheap and for all intents and purposes, they last just as long and the cost per bit is much smaller than a 2.5".

hmm...this is confusing. Get a spiffy new HD for what? the carputer? it's a laptop so it takes a 2.5". Or do you mean an external drive?

Maybe I should try to clarify my situation a little. I have two laptops. One is a powerbook I use at home on a regular basis. It has a 60GB drive that is not backed up at the moment and is pretty much full.

I also have a second laptop that I will be using as a carputer. It has a 40GB drive, but I want more hard drive space than that (80-100 gigs).

So I'm trying to do two things at the same time. I want to 1) have more HD space for my powerbook and possibly back up the internal drive. And 2) have more HD space for the carputer. I could buy 2 drives, one for each computer, but I want to see if there's an effective way to do this by buying just one hard drive.

**2k1Toaster** · 10-26-2006, 01:50 PM

Well what I was saying was just to get a new spiffy drive for the car laptop. Then the spare one out of that laptop can be used externally with the powerbook