Running OS off of External HardDrive

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Anthony_132

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Aug 7, 2016
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I am planning on buying a 1tb external harddrive, and i want to know if it is possible to run an operating system such as win7, or win10 off of the harddrive.... If so, how would i go around to doing that? I just want to be able to change the boot order and run off the hard drive so i can keep all my stuff with me at all times
 
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Barty1884
It depends on the OS and interface.

It may be possible with Windows via an eSATA external HDD, but not via USB. For numerous reasons, mainly being Windows does not support it and least of all, speed. USB 3.0/3.1 is certainly faster than 2.0, but nowhere near as fast as SATA3. eSATA may be possible, but drives availability is limited, at best.

Certain Linux distros can boot from external HDDs, so I would assume it's theoretically possible - but I don't know for sure.

I'd question why you'd want to do it though? Assuming you're talking Windows, there's a whole lot of potential driver/chipset issues (and licensing issues) if you intended to use it on multiple systems. If you just want it to protect data etc, you don't need the...
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Barty1884

Barty1884

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Apr 16, 2015
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It depends on the OS and interface.

It may be possible with Windows via an eSATA external HDD, but not via USB. For numerous reasons, mainly being Windows does not support it and least of all, speed. USB 3.0/3.1 is certainly faster than 2.0, but nowhere near as fast as SATA3. eSATA may be possible, but drives availability is limited, at best.

Certain Linux distros can boot from external HDDs, so I would assume it's theoretically possible - but I don't know for sure.

I'd question why you'd want to do it though? Assuming you're talking Windows, there's a whole lot of potential driver/chipset issues (and licensing issues) if you intended to use it on multiple systems. If you just want it to protect data etc, you don't need the OS on the drive, just the files.
 
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