Boot from USB drive

Hey everyone,

I'm going to be building a new PC soon and have a question. What are the advantages and disadvantages of booting from a regular hard drive vs. a USB hard drive? A USB hard drive seems like it would be much faster, but it seems not many people do it, so I'm wondering if there are pitfalls.

Also, does a computer see any difference in an external USB hard drive and a small USB stick? Or does the external HDD just look like a massive USB stick to the PC? Just curious about loading times, etc. with USB drive.

Thanks

 

By the way, if I end up doing this, is there any way to hook up a USB connection from inside the computer? i.e. put my USB hard drive inside (I'll figure out how to mount it-- I just mean can I somehow connect it directly to the motherboard?)

 

As far as I know, USB hard drives are NTFS (or FAT32 if that's how you decide to format it) but USB sticks are ALWAYS in the FAT format. I think the main problem with using a USB hard drive as your main drive is getting the OS to see it as drive C: all the time. I guess if it's the only hard drive, it would work, but I don't think you'd really see a big jump in performance. And yes, you can hook it directly to the mother board by using the USB header that's usually designated for front USB ports. Many newer motherboards have up to 3 headers (2 ports each for 6 total ports). You'd have to cut the end off the USB data cable and use those little plastic pin 'sleeves' to mount it to the header. Be sure to use the right order: Pins 1, 3, 5, 7: Red, White, Green, Black.....

hd2k

 

You would want to go with an internal drive it is much faster then an external USB 2.0 drive, the external hard drive looks like an internal drive just in an enclosure: like this (I own both of these models btw) http://www.gii.in/gadgets/images/IOmega_320GB_External_hard_disk.jpg
http://www.microsoft.com/library/me...maker/expert/jasondunn-harddrives-figure2.jpg

A usb stick is small the size of your finger: http://www.egallery.fr/trekstor/images/Image/USB-Stick_CS.jpg

You would need to have a motherboard that has USB boot support not all do, for speed purposes use an internal drive

 

Some motherbaord have internal USB conenctions but i woudl recommend just taking it out of its drive enclosure and attaching it normally. its much faster

 

Thanks for the replies. Reason I ask is that I saw a computer load Windows XP in about 10 seconds from a WD USB hard drive (not sure which one, but it was a small one, not full size). But then again it may have been because it was Windows Embedded.

So on to a slightly different topic... What about a Raptor? Are they fast enough to justify the price jump? What about other hard drives? Or am I better off spending the money on more RAM and CPU power rather than on a hard drive?

 

Raptors are fast drives but unless your doing high end gaming and video editing etc i would go for the expra price, i myself have two 7200 RPM's in RAID 0 and it seems fast enough (5.9 on the vista scale) Personally i prefer western digital over other drive companies expically maxtor but you can take a look around and see what fits your budget. also if you motherbaord supports SATA i would recommend getting a SATA drive with NCQ (Native Command Queuing) heres a wikipedia link if you dont know what NCQ is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_command_queuing.

What are the rest of your PC specs?