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Banana
is the next Chiquita
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
 
2009-03-04, 08:08

I'm trying to figure out what/whether it is possible to help me be more productive by parceling out the HD-intensive work so I can continue to do my other stuff. My workflow lately has me running several queries, while I want to continue on development as I wait for the results. As things are right now, I get beachballs a lot if I try to multi-task and I do worry that I'm hastening along my drive's eventual demise.

But I'm not sure if an external hard drive would solve the problem? From what I can tell in my activity monitor, I have processing power to spare (generally 50-60% idling, though it seems to flip-flop between the cores) while my hard drive is quite busy, but I do worry about the extra overhead and lower throughput being a factor that may make the addition pointless. Should I be looking at say, a mini, if I really wanted to parcel out the HD tasks? Or a certain kind of enclosure (which obviously won't be USB; most likely either FW or gigabit ethernet)?
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