Does using an external HD slow down iMovie?

Question

I have stored about 6000 photos on my hard drive. I believe it may be slowing down my computer, so I have thought about buying a separate drive just for iPhoto and iMovie. Would that be a good idea? If so, would I expect the program to run more slowly when working from this external drive? It was suggested to me that I buy the NewerTech ministack V2. That drive is available in a number of sizes. Should I select 320, 400, or 500GB, if I buy that one? Do you have other suggestions? Thanks for any advice you can offer. I am not a techie, I just like to make movies. Miriam

Answer 1

It seems that you're sensibly thinking ahead, and preparing for any trouble!
The external disc(s) wouldn't normally be backed up to .Mac, but if you copy your iPhoto Library and Movies to another destination - as well as to the disc you'll normally keep them on - then you should be well covered.
Your Mercury On the Go drive is probably quite small (60GB or 80GB), so why not use that for your iPhoto Library?
I've got 11,000 photos in my Library, and it uses up 33GB. So you could easily fit your 6,000 photos on your On The Go drive. Moving your iPhoto Library onto that external disc would clear, say, 16GB or so from your internal disc; enough for another hour's worth of DV video editing.
Then you could use a larger capacity external FireWire disc for backups - instead of the On The Go ..and backups would probably run faster - and you could also edit movies on that fast disc, as long as you kept a backup of them on another disc!
Editing movies which are on an external fast FireWire disc generally allows things to run faster, as the internal disc can simultaneously do its own 'housekeeping' duties, or swapping things in and out of memory, or reading bits of program from the internal disc ..while all video data transfers happen exclusively on the external disc.
That's the way professionals edit: always keeping video files on a fast external - or second internal - disc.
The only problem which comes to mind is that some Canon camcorders don't like to be on the FireWire circuit along with any other FW device, such as a separate external disc. If you do have a Canon camcorder, you may need to import to your Mac's internal disc first, then disconnect the Canon camcorder and then copy that imported video to your external disc for editing.
But it's late here, and I gotta go to bed ..bye for now!