laptop or tower?

[pixprof]

I'm considering switching from my Mac G5 tower (dual Motorola processors) to a current 15" Mac Pro laptop. I would plug in my 20" Apple LCD for a larger desktop display and connect my backup drives via Firewire 800 cases as I do now. I would also install 2 to 4G RAM as I'm currently running and continue using my wireless keyboard and Wacom tablet.

One of my concerns is how to use my Western Digital Raptor SATA 10K RPM scratch/main photo working drive, which is currently installed internally in the G5 tower. I could house it in a suitable Firewire 800 enclosure and connect it directly to the 800 port. But I am more leaning towards installing it and other SATA drives in a multi drive enclosure (like satasite's 5-Bay SATA Port Multiplier Drive Enclosure) connected through an eSATA controller card (like CalDigit FASTA-1ex eSATA ExpressCard 34).

Besides settling this external drives problem, the only other questionable area I can think of is the inconvenience of having to unplug and replug all of the cables whenever I would take the laptop out on location (which would be pretty infrequent.) A dyed-in-the-wool tower devotee friend suggested that the laptop just wouldn't be as robust as a tower, especially with a 7200RPM start up drive, where everything would be stressed to work near capacity.

So I'm curious to hear your opinions. Have I just been out in the sun for too long  for even thinking of such a thing or is making a Core 2 laptop now a viable alternative to a tower as a primary workstation?

[Ken Bennett]

I've done it both ways. For a while I was using a G4 Powerbook as my only computer, hooking it up at the studio to an external display, keyboard, hard drives, etc., then taking it apart every night to go home. Now I have a dual G5 tower with 4 gigs of ram, a 10K raptor scratch disk, etc., and a Macbook dual-core intel laptop. I do the heavy-duty image processing on the tower, and use the laptop for general computing and some infrequent location editing.

I'd have to agree with your friend. If you aren't taking advantage of the laptop's portability, then a tower is a better workstation. It runs cooler, it's more expandable, it's easier to add that scratch drive, and it'll hold more ram. The new MacPro towers have 4 or 8 cores, and can handle some unimaginable amount of ram (16 gigs? - though I think 8 is the practical limit). The internal drives are bigger and faster.

If you can only afford one computer (not you personally, but in general, for other readers), *and* you need to take it out of the studio, then a laptop is the only choice. The Intel laptops have good power, but they are still a compromise on disk speed and ram. But they'll work if you can only have one computer.

Oh, and taking the laptop apart and putting it back together in the studio every day was a PITA.

--Ken