[solinari6]

I've heard it mentioned before, that you can put your OS on a firewire drive, and that will be faster than the internal mini drive. Question is, is it really that much faster, that it's worth the effort? I do have a 80 gig 7200rpm firewire drive that I'm currrently using just for extra storage.

Will it be easy to load Tiger on the external drive? Will I then be able to "dual boot" into both Panther (on the internal drive) and Tiger (on the firewire drive)?

[Brad]

It's very easy to install the OS on a separate drive. During installation, simply click the appropriate drive's icon and let it install. To "dual boot" you can either choose which drive from the "Startup Disk" panel in the System Preferences or you can hold the option key as you're rebooting.

If you have the extra drive sitting around idle, just give it a try. Using a faster drive does not make *everything* faster, but it does make disk-intensive processes like launching applications and opening and saving large files perform more quickly.

[FFL]

Yes and yes.

[kretara]

I am booting off of an external firewire (dual) enclosure and the Mini definately boots faster and is faster overall when compared to the really worthless 4200 RPM drive that Apple raped us with.

If you have the money I would suggest putting in a faster internal drive. If not then use the external firewire drive.