This might be a tad OT... but try to stick with me.... I use an HP pavilion notebook as my primary computer. I work as a freelance consultant, so a notebook is really the only way to go for me. I bought mine last year needing lots of horse power for work, so it was pretty bleeding edge at the time (3.2 Ghz HT P4, 768 MB ram). I'm running out of hard drive space between work and Poser files. I know the main bottle neck in my machine is the hard drive anyway (80GB, 5200 RPM). Problem is, there aren't many options in the 7200 RPM range that are an upgrade in terms of space. Both my work and hobby use would defiantly benefit from a faster HD, but if the best I can do is a slight bump in space... I'm not sure it makes sense to spend 300 bucks to upgrade. So I'm thinking about an external drive. That would be relatively cheep and allow me to bide my time until I either buy a new machine or 100 gig plus 7200 internal drives become available. I could banish my huge Poser files to the external drive and have all the room I need. Question is, will rendering be obscenely slow from an external drive? I can do USB 2.0, and Iomega has an 80GB 7200 RPM drive for less than 80 bucks. But I've never used an external before when speed was an issue. I'm sure external to internal speeds are not an apples to apples comparison, but does anyone know how fast a 7200 external will be compared to an internal 5200? I'm defiantly going to get a little more RAM, but do you guys think it's worth the money to even TRY to render from an external HD?