external installation question

[Paul Merrell]

On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 9:10 AM, <aerospace1028 at hotmail.com> 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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