I agree with what you are saying starkers. My seagate is not a powered external but I do have a couple I could try to see if there are any speed differences. Its hard to imagine that speed would improve over what I have now.
Does it make sense the way I installed windows 7 on the external by creating its own partition? I made a large partition just for the operating system 80gb but I do not store files on that partition. I use the rest of the hard drive for files. I found doing it that way made the operating system run faster than my first attempt where I just cluttered up the hard drive with the OS and my large music files.
When i say that a powered drive may be better, it's not so much speed that I was thinking of, but moreso consistency and reliability over USB powered. Thing is, I never had an issue with booting/running Ubuntu on a portable, and obviously you are running Win 7 okay, so maybe there isn't a lag issue with the newer USB 3.0 drives.
I agree with you, Jim, a laptop needs to be clutter free when out and about, and I usually take any additional files, etc on a couple of 64gb sticks, so the powered HDD was more an in-home thing for dual booting, which is not something I'd imagine finding a need to do while at the drs, etc.
