External HDD for Laptop?

[Sniper82]

Since most laptops have like 4200RPM/5400RPM hard drives in them can I used a External USB 2.0 with a 7200RPM drive to run Windows XP and would it be faster?

Not sure if this is even possible.

 

[imported_goku]

Yes it's entirely possible, what you would do is take a laptop HDD or desktop HDD, put it into an enclosure, disable the internal laptop's HDD from booting up or all together and see if you can boot from the external drive.

My sister's 600m wasn't working and so I took an old 4GB laptop HDD, put it into an enclosure, copied a windows 98 installation on to there and booted from there. Loading windows was slow as hell since it only supported USB 1.1, overall I'd say I'd be a bad idea because the USB bus is slow as hell, high latency and just not a good idea. Stick to an internal drive or get a PCMCIA converter to IDE to run a drive externally.

 

[pkme2]

I and my student/clients all use external pocket USB harddrives for quite some time now.
We just got USB enclosures and 2 1/2" harddrives, mostly Travelstars for speed and cache, and put them together. From 20GB to 100GB pocket USBs, these have really helped make storage and transfer very convenient and smart. The low cost and the big capacities have made computing very enjoyable. A Seagate 100GB pocket USB could cost less than $150 shipped. WD 100GB at $132 shipped

 

[imported_goku]

I think what the OP wants to do is use the USB interface for an external HDD (possible a desktop HDD) in hopes of getting better performance over an internal laptop HDD.

 

[sitheris]

i would think it's possible considering usb 2 is 480mbit/s where ide and sata are lower than that

there could be a bottleneck elswehere to this approach though, not rly sure

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: goku
Yes it's entirely possible, what you would do is take a laptop HDD or desktop HDD, put it into an enclosure, disable the internal laptop's HDD from booting up or all together and see if you can boot from the external drive.

My sister's 600m wasn't working and so I took an old 4GB laptop HDD, put it into an enclosure, copied a windows 98 installation on to there and booted from there. Loading windows was slow as hell since it only supported USB 1.1, overall I'd say I'd be a bad idea because the USB bus is slow as hell, high latency and just not a good idea. Stick to an internal drive or get a PCMCIA converter to IDE to run a drive externally.

Windows 98/ME may work, but Windows XP refuses to recongize any USB device as something bootable even though the system BIOS and Linux work fine. Just try to install it and you will see what I mean.

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, Don't forget that the USB is rated in BITS per second and the IDE is rated in BYTES per second. Divide BITS by 8 to compare to BYTES. The external USB drive doesn't care what the internal drive is as long as the External Box matches it. Good Luck, Jim

 

[John]

Originally posted by: Sniper82
Since most laptops have like 4200RPM/5400RPM hard drives in them can I used a External USB 2.0 with a 7200RPM drive to run Windows XP and would it be faster?

Not sure if this is even possible.

No, it will be slower in the enclosure. Clone the old 4200/5400 drive to the 7200 and swap them out.

* Changed swamp to swap

 

[ribbon13]

If you want laptop performance think Seagate 5400.3