My mom has an old eMac 800mhz/256k ram/40g hd

The HD is maxed out because of videos.

I just got an internal 300gb Seagate 7200 with an external firewire case.

Will I need to partition it to improve system response? Will it be fast enough for DV directly or should it just be used to copy stuff over to create room on the internal drive?

 

according to my buddy who is a mac guru.. as long your running os 10 you shouldnt need to partition the hard drive. but you might upgrade your ram to 512.

 

Ditto what chris said...

Firewire should be fast enough to keep up with the data transfer..especially considering you're only running an 800mhz machine.

Final Cut Pro?

 

Shouldn't be a problem in fact I have a couple externals that I boot my mac up with and use the os's on them, I never liked the multiple partition idea. Boosting your ram will help and like gapguy said plenty fast enough considering the speed of your cpu.

 

Thanx guys.

I feel ok breaking the boxes open now. I think I'll at least partition 60gb (I thought it was 40gb) to make an image copy for a backup.

Neil,

No just iMovie.

Chris,

Yes it's OS 10.2.8