Negatives surrounding external hard drives

[JLH555]

I was just wondering what the negatives of using an external hard drive as a "main hard drive" would be. I assume you can use both your internal AND external at the same time... as in playing a game off of your internal hard drive, and then changing to a game on your external hard drive. Would loading screens and the such be really slow on an external hard drive?

Thanks

 

[royalcrown]

I have an external and the biggest one by far is bumping it while on (unless you are using an SSD). The next thing would be to use ESATA as firewire 800 is limited to about 80 MB/sec and 400 half that. USB 3 is faster as well I got about 250+MB/sec on my 32gb sandisk extreme

 

[boosted1g]

First and foremost you will a very difficult time getting windows to even install to an external drive, let alone getting it to boot reliably.

External drives are lower quality hard drives and will fail faster then an internal will.

External drives are slower then most internal drives thus it will be slower.

If using USB 2.0 the drive will be capped at 60 MBPS so it will be even slower.

Lastly an external is just a an accidental drop off the desk away from complete disk failure.

 

[boosted1g]

If you can use esata you can install windows and get it to boot much easier, and you remove the usb 2.0 speed issue.
You still have the fact that the drive is slower, will last longer, and fragile.

Why do you want to use an external as a boot drive, there might be a much better solution.