USB enclosure with a laptop playing music.

[SoundTheSurrender]

I'm wondering what you guys would do. I have a laptop with a 80 gigayte hard drive. I like to play music when I play games on it. I think it would be too much to play games and play music on the same hard drive. Its 5400 RPMs. Would I be better off getting a USB hard drive and using it seperate? I'm sure that would take a load off the hard drive and extend the life.

 

[Lord Evermore]

However the CPU will be used to handle the USB data transfer, so you may end up hurting yourself more that way.

When playing an MP3 or any other music format, there's really not that much data transfer going on. If you've got a song encoded at 128Kbps, that's all the data transfer the drive needs to play the song. The seeks needed to read that data are also not significant; a single 512 byte drive sector can hold 4 seconds worth of song, a 4KB cluster holds 32 seconds. Reading the entire song would only take a small fraction of a rotation of the drive. If you sat and watched your hard drive activity light while a song played, the amount of time that it took for the light to flash would be far longer than the actual time the drive spent seeking any chunks of the data (assuming the media player didn't just load the whole song into memory, or the OS load it into cache).

Also, your drive's activity during an actual active game period should be minimal. If your system is constantly having to read and write data on the drive within a single map or when you scroll across the screen in an RTS, whatever, then you seriously need more RAM.

In all, you aren't going to get better performance with another drive for your songs, and you won't be saving the hard drive any significant amounts of work or increasing its lifespan.

 

[oynaz]

I second that. There is absolutely no need for what the OP asking about.