Boot from external hd?

[suicide007]

What is the performance difference between e-sata external drives and internal sata drives?

I have a laptop with limited memory, and I'm installing an additional boot drive on my desktop for vista ultimate 64, and i figured i would at least look into using one device for both solutions. My main concern is that booting from an external HD would be significantly slower than booting from an internal drive. Is that a real issue or not?

and all sata and esata ports on my pc are 3gbs. i would get an external hd with firewire b and esata ports, cause my laptop has a firewire b port.

 

[hikaricloud]

Moved to the right section.

 

[KSoD]

Well aside from the speed concern you would have to consider 2 things.

1. the OS you plan on using on the external.

the reason i say this is because vista/Win7 do now allow installs to a external device. Not to mention the fact that it would be used on 2 different systems which would throw Windows for a loop everytime you tried to boot to it from the external on the other device.

The hardware profile would be different on the desktop compared to the laptop and would cause Widnows not to boot properly depending on which system you used to install Widnows with. As it would have that hardware configuration and it wouldnt match when you tried to boot it with the other machine.

the other thing with this is the license. 1 serial = 1 PC. Using it on a external between 2 machines that you would use it on would be considered a violation of this.

2. Booting from a external Device is tricky at best.

As everytime you remove the device from the desktop and put it on the laptop it would get a different designation by the system which would cause Windows not to boot properly as the designation of the drive/partition wouldnt match what it has stored in the boot files. So you would have to not only have dual installs of Windows on there to stay within the legal relms of the license, but you would have to edit the boot files everytime you switched the device from the desktop to the laptop or vice versa to make sure that the boot designations are the same.