On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 9:10 AM, <aerospace1028@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello all,
it looks like my laptop is able to boot from an external harddrive.
Before I get too excited about jumping on this option, is there anything to look at from the external drive side of things that could throw a monkey-wrench in the works?
No major barriers so long as you're not struck by the problem Kye describes for some machines. But:
* External drives tend to fail a lot more often than internal drives; they are not as well protected from being hit or moved while in use and such hits can corrupt or break the drive's read/write heads or score the disk. Get a connecting cable long enough to locate the drive where it won't get jostled and don't touch it while it's powered up.
* External drives still have to be mounted and dismounted. If you fail to dismount, the drive may quit working, sometimes permanently. (I borked one two weeks ago this way and now it just gives me the beep-beep of a permanently failed hard drive.)
* USB 3.0 data transfers are way faster than USB 2.0 but still quite a bit slower than SATA transfers. To maximize performance, get an external drive with an eSATA connection. Or you can get an external combo hub that will provide both SATA and USB 3.0 connections (for bare drives only).
* To get high performance from an external USB 3.0 hard drive, you need to have a USB 3.0 connection on your computer. If you hitch the drive to a USB 2.0 connection on your computer, it will still work but you'll get only USB 2.0 data transfer rates.
* I like external hard drives for big data transfers between computers that have no network connection and for backups. But I don't think I could be persuaded to install an OS on one for production use. I'd be more inclined to put the OS on a USB 3.0 thumb drive, because they are far hardier than external hard drives. But that would be for traveling around; I still prefer an internal hard drive for production use. Faster data transfer rates and far less likely to get borked by jostling.
* If you decide to boot from an external hard drive, do some thinking first about how you're going to do backups. The drive may be more useful for backups than for booting an OS.
Best regards,
Paul
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