Running a FW800 drive for extended periods of time?

[Nike SB'd]

So I just purchased a MacGurus mini firewire enclosure and a 500GB Seagate Momentus 7200.4 drive and I have a few questions...

I am a photographer/magazine editor and I initially wanted to buy a portable drive because I no longer have a macbook to move files with me from work to home and vice-versa. After doing a little more research I am now thinking of using the portable drive to do a few things besides just data storage for transferring from one computer to another. I am considering using the drive to store image files, contain an iTunes library (so I can sync all of my computers) and run the scratch disk for Photoshop off the drive. However I have read some mixed reviews about running a portable drive for extended periods of time.

Some of the problems I have read about are hard drives shutting off/unmounting during a large file transfer (say 20GB). I have also read about drives going bad after being on for a long time, usually as a fault of the bridge. Albeit most of these issues I have read are concerning off-the-shelf type portable drives which I am aware usually consist of somewhat faulty drives and poorly made bridges. I'm wondering if the configuration I have just purchased will be susceptible to these types of failures?

In addition I'm wondering if running the PS scratch disk off this drive will give me a noticeable improvement in performance? I've heard it does wonders working this way, but I have no experience in doing so. My work computer is a 20" iMac (intel dual 2.4GHz chipset I believe) w/ 4GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM. When working on larger files (80 or so layers 16-bit files are common, roughly 1-2GB files) the computer takes what seems like an eternity to save and I'm also wondering if this will speed up by working on files off the external drive?

Last but not least, if I do save files, keep an iTunes library and run the scratch disk on this drive would it run better with two partitions (one for files and one solely for scratch disk)? Sorry for all the questions, I'm just trying to get the best setup given the hardware I have. Thanks in advance!

-Sean

[ricks]

If you run the drive non stop then make sure it is not in its carry case and has full airflow access, ie: don't bury it with papers or other stuff.

The little mini Firewire case is going to work fine used constantly. It does not have fans cooling it so its temperatures will run a little higher than a bigger desktop enclosure with fans. My testing still showed them to run under 110 degree drive temperature in a 75 degree office environment. This is well below what those drives run inside a portable computer. This will give us a longer drive life in the mini case than inside your MacBook.

If the drive were empty it would do ok as a scratch drive. But a half full 2.5 inch drive is not very fast compared to a near empty 3.5 inch drive. Yes, it helps to separate off some of the disk access to another drive - any other drive. A small platter size drive is somewhat down the performance list of hard drives when that list includes the larger 3.5 inch drives. You will see some performance gains dedicating one to scratch but they will be modest compared to a bigger drive doing the same tasks.

Rick