My wife is wanting to run Poser on my laptop but the capacity of the laptop drive will not support all that she has. The laptop capacity is limited to 60 GB. Can someone provide me with their external drive setup?

Which external drive are you using?
How many hours a day is it being used?
Have there been failures using the external drive?

It is almost evident that I need to purchase another high-end system for this secondary usage.

I have all my external runtimes on a seagate 160 GB external. It's on 24/7 and I've never had any problems with it. It loads the content at about the same speed as an internal, and Poser has never had problems finding it.

i have poser installed on my c drives, but all of my content is in external runtimes on an external drive.  I use poser at least 6 hours a day on any given day and never have an trouble with my setup

Quote - I have all my external runtimes on a seagate 160 GB external. It's on 24/7 and I've never had any problems with it. It loads the content at about the same speed as an internal, and Poser has never had problems finding it.

My wife is a beta tester and is running 12-14 hours a day and the techs at the computer stores are stating that the external harddrives are meant for backups only and will not hold up to the constant access.  

My Poser is on my laptop as well, my runtimes are on an external drive and every now and then when I know that work is going to be boring and I'll be sitting the majority of the day doing nothing, I'll transfer a few runtimes to the laptop and take them with me.  When I get home I just delete them off the laptop and plug back into the external.

When I set my desktop back up, I'll probably just keep using the external drive even though my desktop has a 500 gig hard drive in it.  hahaha

Go for it, it's a sweet set up and your laptop will be happy that it doesn't have to scan your runtime all the time.

i cant speak to that, I am a beta tester too for 3 different poser brokerages, and my 6 hour poser day is a light day, I test from 2 differnt machines, but th machine with the external sees at least 6 hours of use a day...poser is almost always up and running in some fashion or another.  

Its always best to have a clean runtime for beta testing anyway, so if she has 60 GB on the laptop's drive, she should be able to load all the things she needs for beta testing on there anyway, and keep the poser stuff she renders for fun on the external, which would see less use. 

"My wife is a beta tester and is running 12-14 hours a day and the techs at the computer stores are stating that the external harddrives are meant for backups only and will not hold up to the constant access."

I think thats smoke.   

If she can use firewire try to get that - there was a big difference in loading speed for me.  Normally I don't say this about any computer hardware, but with ext drive you may want to get the store warranty in addition to whatever mfg one comes with it. 

My wife is a beta tester and is running 12-14 hours a day and the techs at the computer stores are stating that the external harddrives are meant for backups only and will not hold up to the constant access.  

Nolan
I don't know why the techs are telling you that but it's simply not true.  I run a 500 Gig external SATA where I run all my Runtimes with both Poser 6 and 7.  It's basically like running an internal HD.  It works great.  The external HD are made to access as well as storage.
Adrian

I use a Maxtor 160 Gb external for all my external runtimes.  It's on 24/7 and I've never had a data loss at all.

I use the external drive precisely because I can hook it up to my laptop when I'm traveling.

I have attached a 160 GB external 7200rpm USB harddrive and will give it a go. Her runtime files total 120GB so I'll give it a try. IF this fails I only have 2 options after this - a separate server with raid setup or another full-up desktop. I appreciate everyones comments. My wife has said many were using the external drives but after ordering replacements CD's ($$$$$) for her downloads I was hesistant. Slowly but slowly and surely I am replacing all her IDE drives with SATA drives. 

Noland

HI Brandy!!! That's me hubby is talking about here LOL

Well, I have burned and crashed 3 external HDs and can't understand why. I mean, everyone else (or the ones I read and hear about anyway) seem to have good luck running off an external so I don't know what my problem is

As far as I know, other than the 90 day warranty that the external comes with, no other warranty is even offered

Most stores - Comp Usa , Best Buy, Radio Shack, Circuit City, American - will offer in store warranties - they are extra - normally you have the sales guy riding your butt the entire time you are there trying to get you to buy one.  You must be one of the lucky ones if you haven't experienced that.

The only reason I say this is it is a pita having to ship out something that very well might crash.  Even so the store warranty wont cover data loss.  

My external recently crashed too.  The person at the store literally said these words to me:
 "If your data was so important you'd think you would have backed it up to more than one place."

Luckily we were on the phone and he was in no immediate danger of bodily harm.

External drives don't last as long if you leave them turned on all the time because of heat. Turn them off when you are done for the day and they will last much longer.

Acomdata and LaCie make fanless drives where the whole casing functions as a heatsink. I have two Acomdata 250s, an Acomdata 350 and a LaCie 500gig, and they all work flawlessly, even if left on for long periods of time. Buy one for your Poser runtimes and one as a backup data drive, because unless it is in more than one place, your data is one electromagnetic pulse away from oblivion.

I have numerous externals full of Poser and Bryce. Unfortunately, I had one backup external connected to my PC when that nast pollipo32 virus hit and it spread to my external and infected everything. I still wish I could kick that hackers ass.

I guess from the mixed responses - cudos to you that have had no problem and to those that have experienced our mishaps here - "your monies are someone elses".  I have 2 computers that are not being used soooooooooooooooo - I think in spare time I will build a mirror of poser/runtimes for my better half and once a month do a dump. In the meantime I am dumping to an external upstairs.

That's one thing that's never happened to me, Sherrie.  Of course, I haven't been hit with a virus in over 4 years - alot of that is thanks to Mailwasher since I download very few email messages to my computer.  Most of the time I just answer inside Mailwasher or I read them there without downloading.

  I'm using a Seagate 160 GB professionally..... "at work", and have never had any problems... it's on 24 / 7, and is accessed constantly. Lou.

Actually, it is much easier I am finding to save everything in external runtimes and then save copies of those runtimes on another drive or PC. I finally have almost everything in external runtimes like "V4 runtime", "furniture runtime", etc.

I use external drives to hold all my Poser stuff (not the program) and have had two that failed.  The first one was a Maxtor (now seagate) which was under warranty for one year for replacement but not for Data recovery. That cost me $300.00 which was cheap compared to most of the places I checked into and the second was a 500 gb Western Digital I BOOK.  I had the latter for only two weeks and after loading all the stuff I bought from Daz It craped out.  Lost everything, but fortunately Daz has a re-set option and I am slowly getting what I can back other then some of the freebies which aren't available anymore.  With Western Digital there is also a 1 year warranty but you must use their authorized Data recovery services as not to void the warranty  and when I called them, I was told it would be a miminum of $1,000.00 to get the lost data back so I told them where to go.  If there is anything I can say to help anyone out there.......it is to Recommend Not to buy Western Digital and to back everything up on disks.  In fact that was my intention when I bought the 500 gb drive in order to get my stuff organized to put on disks. 
Maxtor was great and allowed me to take the hard-drive where-ever I wanted as long as they got a letter from the Data recovery service stating that it was opened by them to recover the data and they sent me a replacement "Free of Charge!"
Western Digital was less then helpful and in fact they sent me an e-mail informing me that "They had shipped the wrong cables" with the hard-drive, warning me that it could damage the hard-drive if I used it, two weeks after the hard-drive crashed!!
I took the drive back to the store where I bought it and got my money back, but I am still working on getting my Daz purchases back.  It's really more a pain and time spent downloading stuff I had but I was lucky that I could at least do that. 
Personally, I would not trust running Poser on an external hard-drive unless you have what you want on a back-up disk.  You never know when it may crap out and you may be left with nothing.

My Poser is on one of my internal SATA drives, my runtimes now live on my other SATA drive but they did reside on one of my Iomega external hard drives for a couple of years without a problem.

I've got a Seagate USB 120 Gb external at the house and two at the office and if I leave any of them on for over two hours they begin to sound like coffee grinders and the one at the house has been reformatted twice.  You know what that means: loss of massive amounts of data, including the final version of my Masters' Thesis.

I know that, in theory, it should be possible...I've just never been able to get an external USB hard drive to live up to its advertising copy.  Maybe it's because I expect it to...well, do what they say it should do?

I'm using mine now exclusively for backup storage.  I hope to one day have a USB/Firewire HD that I can trust that is affordable.

Both of my external hard drives are Iomega 160 Gigs and they're both on 24/7.  One of them is now my backup drive, the other is my temp drive for unzipping stuff to move around.  Neither one of these has ever failed in over 2 years of constant use and access.  The only reason I moved my external runtimes is because the load time from my SATA drive is much faster.

I have an external segate, 400 gig, on 24/7 never a problem with it. Love it!

Well it seems it works for most and not for some LOL. Unfortunatley I am part of the some....sniff, sniff... well, I have an external here I will try before I pop any more money into another. 

Thank you all for your input!

Western Digital had a series of hard drives that failed a lot. Run a search. Most of them fail around 1-2 years. I don't know why, but it seems the bigger they get, the more often they fail.

  Y'know..... with all the stories about dying Hard drives, I still hear about, Gods know how many, people who do not archive on CDROM. For heaven's sake, they're cheap enough... as cheap as floppys got, toward the end. Even the DVD-ROMs are getting dirt cheap.... the write 'ware is still "kinky" though... lost months of work to one. One thing I haven't heard anything about, lately, is the crystal storage they're working on.... they have it working, just too expensive for high end... you can get one..... it's 100,000 USD to get one, though... the capacity, last I heard, was so high that it was a deal of spending several lifetimes using up a significant amount of space on it.......... Imagine trying to organise files and folders on that  :scared:  Lou.

archdruid, could you post a link to info about that crystal storage device? Quite OT, I admit, but I'm professionally interested in new storage methods.

I'm going to make a guess here. I run a Seagate USB2 drive with my Poser runtime and a lot of other stuff, and it's running 24/7 without problems. But it's sitting on a shelf with plenty of airflow, and this room is cooler than I hear of some offices in the US. And it doesn't get moved about. Also, a good-quality USB lead. If you're working somewhere warm, or if you move it around a lot, I reckon you could be at higher risk of problems. A lot of the big external drives are not, I suggest, a true portable solution. But they're a good way of adding a large drive to your system.

the one caveat to using externals i can think of is it would be better if using multiple external drives to have one usb then a firewire if you have to have two

I did try using 1 usb for external runtimes then another usb for textures. after about a month I began finding there had been write errors (mostly my own fault for sticking with the fat 32 they were preinstalled with instead of ntfs - but some were delayed write errrors where too much data went on the usb for it to handle)

I use for my runtime directory two external USB Drives without any problems. 
I think the "beta-test-user" uses inferior hardware.

  svdl, I'll try to locate the info for you. Lou

Firewire is technically just plain better than USB2.0, both in design and in implementation. The communication protocol is more sophisticated, more intelligence in the Firewire controllers themselves, whereas USB is controlled mainly by the CPU.

Which might account for the delayed write problems. It's not the USB connector at the external drive that checks whether everything is OK, it's the CPU at the other end that does the checks. That's different from FireWire.

As for heat, there's a good chance AntoniaTiger is right. A couple of years I had an external case for drive units, with its own PSU and fan, it could house a 5.25" unit or a 3.5" unit (with brackets). Since it had its own fan and PSU, the drive ran cool and never had any problem.

Another thing: power supply. FireWire can deliver far more power over the cable than USB2.0. So reliability of the external drives could very well be related to power consumption. Another reason to prefer FireWire over USB when using external drives.