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Running a system off an external hard drive - any cons ?

W

wearetheborg

Member
My laptop has only a 60GB HDD, and as I dual boot, I'm a bit starved for space.
I have an external 400GB HDD, and my laptop apparently supports booting from USB, so I was considering using the external HDD to run an OS from.

Any cons ?

Also, say I run OS from an external 2.5 HDD housed in an aluminium enclosure.
Will it be cooler than the internal HDD of the laptop ?
 
Yeah the cons of booting from a external usb drive is that the usb bus is extremely slow compared to if you boot from the internal hard drive with an ide or sata connection.
 
Speed.

External drives are much more likely to die prematurely.

You need to carry around both the laptop and the external drive.

If you're going to go into booting-from-another drive territory, you'd be better off just dropping a new internal 2.5" drive into the laptop.
 
Yeah - I have steadily upgraded my laptop HDDs from 60 GB to 160 GB. I then put the former 2.5" drives into external cases and use them for data archiving, such as photos and music.

You can still use your external drive as a data drive and boot from your 60GB internal, and thus not sacrifice performance for storage space.

As far as temperature of the drives is concerned, it really doesn't make much difference unless you have one of those desktop P4 processors. They are to be avoided.
 
I would call that more myth than reality. I've used external drives, mostly 2.5", for over 4 years and have never had one fail. There are too many variables to make such a blatant generalization. For instance, most of my external drives are not in constant use. They are hot plugged when needed, so their exposure to failure is a lot less than internal ones. Whenever someone makes a claim like that, I want to see supporting data and stats.
 
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