Running OS from Portable Hard Drive

[Stanran]

I'm not sure if I'm in the perfect section here, but it's worth a shot. My Western Digital 300GB Internal Hard Drive has gone bad, and all I have left is a Buffalo Mini-Station Stealth 500GB Portable Hard Drive and was wondering, if I run my Operating System from it, how slow will it all be? I plan to run Windows 7 - Home Premium 32-Bit. I heard it is slower, but I'm not sure "how slow" that is. Some people said that the OS would take about a minute to load up, but once that's done, everything should work fine. Now, I understand that if I try to transfer files to the Drive running my OS, that the transfer rate would be longer, as it's USB, but I don't mind that. All I really want to know is, once it's loaded, would my System's Ram take over afterwards, so I can continue to play my games? Or would the fact that everything is reading from the Portable Hard Drive, cause my games to run extremely slow?

 

[popatim]

if its usb 2 plan on transfer rates at least 3 times longer than normal. so loading windows would probably be closer to 3 to 4 minutes. If you dont have lots of ram the swap file will get used which this drive will also slow down.

If its usb3 and you have usb3 ports on your computer than you will get nearly full drive speed and not have an issue.

 

[phil22]

You might want to consider extracting the hard drive from the Buffalo enclosure and installing it internally.

 

[Stanran]

if its usb 2 plan on transfer rates at least 3 times longer than normal. so loading windows would probably be closer to 3 to 4 minutes. If you dont have lots of ram the swap file will get used which this drive will also slow down.

If its usb3 and you have usb3 ports on your computer than you will get nearly full drive speed and not have an issue.

So, that means no gaming then? I only have 2Gb DDR3 Ram(Two Separate 1GB Sticks add up to make my 2Gb's) It's why I consider Windows 7 - 32-Bit OS, for now. The Drive is Usb 2.0

 

[getochkn]

I don't if win7 would boot from an external. As said,take the drive out of the external case and put that in the pc. NOTE, some, very few, but some external drives use a special interface that doesn't let them connect to a PC, so you'd be SOL.

 

[Stanran]

I don't if win7 would boot from an external. As said,take the drive out of the external case and put that in the pc. NOTE, some, very few, but some external drives use a special interface that doesn't let them connect to a PC, so you'd be SOL.

It's all good. I was afraid to open it, incase of damage and didn't even know that portable hard drives were just laptop hard drives, with a Usb attachment, on the inside, that can easily be removed, once the case was removed properly.
Pretty clever to see all that, once I went through a YouTube Video about it. You can even use that little Usb attachment, on other hard drives, to use them as portable hard drives! That's so awesome!.. Anyway, I opened the case, and put the drive into my Pc, so I'm up and running, till I get another hard drive. The only problem, is having to transfer really huge files, such as my games, from my mom's computer to the new hard drive. Back & forth, back & forth, Oi!!! lol... Thanks for the help guys. Have a good day.

 

[Stanran]

Best answer selected by Stanran.

 

[Stanran]

Nevermind, the hard drive just gave me the blue screen of death, while gaming. Gonna make another post on this. -.-