BleepingComputer.com: Does An External Hd Improve Performance ?

I was just wondering, Does an External H D improve PC performance at all ?



{Mod Edit: Moved to more appropriate forum~~boopme}

I would say no, unless your external is a faster HD than your internal. Most extenals are used for storing data, I use mine for backing up stuff from my main drive in case something goes wrong. I've used it a few times too, one time I had not backed up some stuff and lost it.

Ok, but from what you are saying when the External is turned on, can the computer make a decision to use it in any way ? And when you say faster, I can understand larger capacity but where would faster come in ?

It dawned on me yesterday when my machine suddenly started to get slow and a little out of control, after I opened a personal joke- e-mail that directed me to a web site, I immediately thought I was infected, I scanned with a couple of anti-V programs and found nothing, but it must have scared the evil spirits away because after reboot, Its ok again ! That made me wonder about viruses and trojans getting into my E-HD, can they ?

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If you save an infected file to your external hardrive or run any infected programs from that hd then yes. Also if you connect your hd upto anyone elses Pc you may infect them or transfer infected files to thier Pc.

An example: I downloaded a ropey copy of nero. I saved it to a folder on my external hd that i scan before doing anything with downloaded stuff. The scans all came back clear. At least two months later while my av was doing its routine scan it suddenly picked up a backdoor in the copy of nero. Luckily i had not installed or done anything with the file so i should be alright, but i could of distributed that file to countless friends.

Think of viruses like std's, so be careful what you do with your equipment and where you put it!

DC

Ok, Thanks, . . How about Ext.HD, . .is that using up RAM to an appreciable degree ?

If you've got Indexing enabled for the drive, it'll take up resources. Otherwise, it's not much different from an internal drive - the major "bottleneck" will be the transfer speed (reads and writes).