What's the advantages / Disadvantages of booting from an external HD?

I have an iMac which I want to boot from an external HD (1TB Western Digital) and I wanted to know the advantages and disadvantages of doing this.
If it's an Intel dual processor, can I use either a USB drive or a Firewire drive to do this?
Thanks for all and any input as well.

You can use Firewire, which would be faster than USB. If the external supports it, FW 800 will be pretty fast. Advantage would be you conserve the internal and place wear on the external, which is then no problem to replace if it dies. Disadvantage might be that moving large files would be somewhat slower. If you do this, I'd keep making backups from the external to the internal using a cloning program like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. You might need a much larger second external for Time Machine, if you want to use that.
You should also know that many, if not most, WD externals won't boot a Mac and they have a very flaky reputation with Macs in general. I'd get a different drive period. They are mostly bad news. Unreliable.
http://www.bombich.com/

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Converting RAW to DNG! What are the advantages / disadvantages?

I have Canon cameras and shoot RAW, but the question itself is surely also valid for Nikon, Sony or other brand-shooters.
When importing my pictures to Lightroom, I could convert them to DNG but didn't do this up to now, because I do not know what I loose. I suppose that I loose the ability to process my files with DPP, but I will not do that anyhow. I can appreciate the advantage of having the file in an open documented format, where even I could easily write a reader for it. So the answer should not be what I can easily find in the Adobe introduction into DNG. I have also the DNG specification in front of me, and I can read it, because I once wrote a program to read TIFF files. I understand that I could add the original RAW image stream, but I do not want using up the space wasted for this. I know, that all development parameters used for the specific RAW image can be written with the image file instead of having those stored in a database or a side-car-file.
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Feierwoon wrote:
That wasn't the question... .
Based on the title of the thread and your initial post, it seems like your question had a lot of
"What are the advantages / disadvantages?"
in it, and only a little
"What happens at a technical level when converting"
But if you want more detailed info about conversion, and you have the aptitude to understand, I recommend doing what Lr5user-pt recommended:
Download the DNG SDK and dig in - all your questions will be answered (and if not, you can also ask DNG-specific technical questions in the DNG forum).
As far as my "sources" regarding the technical summary I presented, they are many and varied, none of which are the DNG SDK. In other words, my knowledge is based more on experience over the years - I don't know all the details under the hood..
Some experiments to consider doing:
* exiftool (-X) a proprietary raw file, then convert to DNG and repeat.
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Personally, if DNG supported sidecars, I would be more likely to convert, because file-management/backup is only an issue if you "forget" about xmp sidecars (and I do not forget), and I'd rather have my xmp in separate ready-to-read xml text files, rather than embedded in binary files, but hey, that's me..
PS - I always use/encourage-others-to-use DNG when distributing raws to others for use in Adobe software, so xmp is not separate and can not get lost.
PPS - proprietary raws and dngs are both just glorified tiff files - raw data, previews, and metadata..
Don't get me wrong: I am NOT anti-DNG, and in fact - just the opposite: I am PRO dng, it's just that I wouldn't (don't) convert my own raws to DNG at this point. If you find the reasons to convert now are sufficiently compelling, you have my complete support and cooperation, fwiw..
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Rob

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Hi,
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When you see answers and helpful posts, please click Vote As Helpful, Propose As Answer, and/or Mark As Answer. Thank You

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Dear Expprts
Please tell me,
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HI
GLOBAL VARIABLE UR USE ANY BLOCK IN PLSQL
BUT LOCAL VARIABLE USED ONLY THERE THEY DECLARE.
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Keith Aul

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Just my 2 cts
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When you see answers and helpful posts, please click Vote As Helpful, Propose As Answer, and/or Mark As Answer. Thank You

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Hello
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HTH -- Mark D Powell --
Thanks for the information Mark ... Much Appreciated

What's the advantages / Disadvantages of booting from an external HD?

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