Resolved Disadvantage of booting to external hdd?

Its time to upgrade a small hard drive on a desktop, and I'm looking at bestbuy and seeing external drives in a case that are just as cheap (and with the same amount of storage) as internal drives.

Using an external hdd would sure save me a heck of a lot of time; I can only assume that copying files would be easier when the old internal and the new external are plugged in. Eventually, I'd want to copy everything on the old internal drive over to the new external drive; the old drive is 5 years old or so, and so I'd rather not chance an hdd failure.

Having never done this before--is there anything wrong with booting to an external drive (Windows 7)? Or is there any other reason why I should NOT use an external drive as the everyday storage, for files if not the entire contents of the hdd?

 

This computer is used strictly for personal use, light surfing and viewing of pics and videos.

You two make interesting points about using both at the same time, the external for files and the internal for the OS. The only problem with that is that this hard drives is 4 years old, and I'm thinking that since I'm going to get a new drive, I might as well use the new one for booting up as well, so I don't have to replace the internal drive in another year or two. At least the plan is for me to upgrade the RAM as well, so a new hard drive and extra RAM should turn this into a decent computer for casual use.

I just looked at the service manual and (famous last words) replacing the internal drive looks easy enough. Its just that I did it once with a Dell desktop, and I had to hold my hand at a tight angle as I unscrewed it from the case. Not one of my favorite computer upgrades.

OK I’ll go with a faster internal drive then.

 

If you attempt to install Windows 7 onto a removable drive you will get an error informing you that Windows cannot be installed on a USB/Firewire external drive. The only option you have then is to cancel the installation.

 

That settles it then. I'll simply replace the current internal drive with another internal drive.

OK thanks to you both for your answers.

 

You're welcome.


Please mark your thread as 'Resolved'.

 

I'm intending to get a Seagate. I've yet to have a Seagate drive go south on me yet. I'm looking at a 2 Tb Seagate in the $70-100 range.

If you have something else in that same price range, that you think is better than a Seagate, I'm certainly willing to listen.

 

Note that Seagate's Barracuda 7200 RPM hard drives are only designed for:

(2400 divided by 24 hours per day equals 100 days).

Also:

Seagate Barracuda - 2 year warranty
Western Digital Black - 5 year warranty​

 

From what I've just read online, that 2400 POH refers to an AFR (average failure rate) of less than 1%. So they are not saying that their drives will only last 100 days 24x7; they are saying that less than 1 percent of their drives can be expected to fail at that length of time. That seems to be borne out in the Seagate spec page: http://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/barracuda-ds1737-1-1111us.pdf

Also, the Seagate 2 TB barracuda 7200 RPM I'm loooking at, as well as the WD that Evan linked to above, both have 300,000 load/unload cycles.

FWIW, the specs on the two are the same: 7200 RPM, up to 6 Gbps data transfer, 64 meg cache. The Seagate is only $100, though.

One thing is for sure: Seagate is not a recognized king of hard drives. There was one study by a storage provider that showed them as by far the worse: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

 

I was afraid you were going to ask me that.

Seriously, I'm a big believer in going with what has worked in the past, which is Seagate. But I'm still trying to make sense out of those numbers in the backblaze study. I mean, there were some 25,000 hard drives in their study. Verrrry interesting. I might change my mind the longer I reflect on that.... 25,000 hard drives is surely a larger sample size than the 10 or so I've worked with over the years of owning personal computers....

 

Evan, I'm going to set up a poll. I'd like to get a lot of folks' opinions/experience on this.

At least I will when I figure out how to do it.

 

Please re-read Seagate's 7200-RPM Drive Specification Comparison.

8760 divided by 24 hours per day = 365 days a year
2400 divided by 24 hours per day = 100 days a year

In other words, Seagate has specifically designed their Barracuda line of hard drives to only run for a limited Power-On-Hours of 8 hours per day, 5 days a week up to 2,400 hours (100 days) per year.


(* I didn't say it, Seagate did. I'm just the messenger.)

 

SpywareDr, I'm not disputing the 100 days point. But what I stated was that--using Seagate's own specs that I linked to above--immediately above that was a AFR of less than 1%. So if I'm understanding that number correctly, they are saying that the vast majority (99%) of their hdds should be expected to go beyond that. Additionally, the load/unload cycles was the same as with the WD drive Evan linked to.

If I'm misunderstanding the significance of the 2400 number, please explain.

 

If the "8x5" meant AFR they would have put it on a AFR row in the chart, not on the POH (power on hours) row.

The "24x7" on the Power On Hours row means 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. (Especially considering the fact that it's preceded by 8760, which is the total number of hours in a 365 day year).

So then in that same chart, on that same Power On Hours row, you see an "8x5" for the Barracuda ... it means 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, (and up to 100 days per year [2400/24]).

POH doesn't suddenly change to meaning AFR because it's an "8x5" instead of a "24x7 ".