Internal vs External

The othe day I won a new WD MyBook 160 gig hd with at USB 2.0 interface. I also just purchased a new Dell E1705 with a 80 gig 5400 rpm hd. The WD MB is 7200 rpm with a 16mb cache and can transfer at 480mb/s according to WD. ( http://www.wdmybook.com/en/specs/index.asp?id=232 )

I was wondering which one of these is going to be faster for my pc and which I should use most. Should I store just data on the WD or put games on there too? Ive been searching for answers to which is faster but have found nothing. What do you guys think?

 

I have a 250gb 7200rpm WD SE16 with the same specs that i made myself by putting in an enclosure and i've found that i get transfer rates that are steadier though slightly slower than my 80 gig 5400rpm internal. I would backup all your movies, program files, music, data, etc for sure. As to games, i dont know that you can install them onto an external though i'm pretty sure it has to be on the C: drive though you can put program files on a D: partition... I don't know too much about it, but that's what i believe is the case. If i have time later i can get you some hdtune screenshots to compare the performance of the internal vs external

 

For sure, external HD's transfer rate is slower than internal. External HD is good for use in storage such as backup and save the files and documents there. In case you would like to need some files in another computers, it is a good idea to move the external hd to another one. External HD is not mainly for Windows and application storage before of the low speed of a transfer rate.