# iBook, boot from firewire HD?



## drewday (Sep 26, 2001)

Since all you out there with iBooks/have worked with ibooks have discovered that the HD performance is less then steller, I was thinking of booting off a firewire HD, though I'm wondering if there will be any performance gains, I'm mostly concerned with access times.

I wanted to know if it was possible for it to have two OS X installs, one on the firewire drive and the other on the internal HD so that I could just unplug the firewire HD on the go and have the system default to the internal HD on the nextboot for being on the road, and then when I get home plug the firewire drive back in and load from there. Am I the only one thinking that this kind of setup, assuming the firewire HD performance was halfway decent, combined with OS10.1 would make the ibook a pretty decent performer? Or is booting from a firewire drive even possible on the iBook?


-Drew


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## symphonix (Oct 3, 2001)

I vaguely remember someone saying you can't boot off a firewire drive *YET* though I'm not sure how reliable this info is.
Frankly, I wouldn't bother. How much of a performance gain do you expect by switching to an external drive? And would it be worth the inconvenience of two separate systems running on your machine? I also assume that once booted from an external drive, you couldn't even think of disconnecting it without shutting down, not verry convenient when you have to pack up and hit the road. And, as you've already worked out, implementing boot-off firewire is a heck of a job.
I just get around the problem by not shutting down! The iBook will sleep for days without mains power, and in 10.1 comes back to life faster than ever. I restart it every week or so just to keep the system tidy. Sure, it boots slowly, but I never have to wait for it to boot - I just pull it out of my bag and open it up.


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