Best Option to Improve Computer Speed Using External Hard Drive?

Hi!
My eMac's 80 gig hard drive is full - mainly due to music, movies and photos - so it is slow and I can't add new media. I cloned the whole hard drive to a 1TB external drive. The computer boots from the external drive. The hard drive is connected to the computer via a FireWire 800 to Firewire 400 adapter cable. I am running Leopard. My RAM is maxed out.
When I boot from the external HD, I seem to get a boost in performance but this seem intermittent and/or not substantial. I have not tested it with a stop watch yet.
I want to get the best performance from my machine. Please help me with the best option. What sounds best?
1) Forget about cloning. Copy my music, movies and pictures to the external hard drive. Delete these media files from the original eMac to free up space. Run the eMac from the internal drive and access these files from the external drive.
2) Boot from the cloned external hard drive and use computer like that.
3) Will it help if the internal eMac HD is not so full? Does this matter if I am booting up from an external drive? Should I delete most or all files from the internal eMac HD and then boot the computer from the EXTERNAL drive? Would this speed things up?
4) I am open to other suggestions.
The only reason I would not prefer option #2 is that I like to keep all my files on the same drive for backup purposes. I use Time Machine.
Thanks!

Your Mac will run best and fastest if you run from the internal HD -- it's much faster than an external HD.
And it's best to keep at least 15% free on it; as your startup drive gets more full, your Mac will slow down. Just how much and when depends on a lot of things, but if it gets over 95% or so, it may get very sluggish, apps may hang or crash, data may be corrupted or lost, etc.
So your best bet would be a larger HD in your Mac. I don't know if that's possible or how much it would cost.
Second best would be to put selected data on an external HD, preferably not the one you use for Time Machine. As long as you format that HD for a Mac, Time Machine can back it up, along with your internal HD.
Put Music on the external for sure, and things like documents.
Photos and Video, maybe. Editing will be much slower on a F/W disk than your internal. So it might make sense to do editing on the internal, then put completed video on the external. You'll have to figure that out depending on what you're doing and how.
For help moving things, see:
[Moving your iTunes Music folder|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449]
[Moving your iPhoto library|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1229]
[Moving iMovie footage to another drive|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1026]

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