SSD external or internal?

[akaimetsuki]

Hello, I am new to building computers and saw the term SSD used, looked into it and it looks pretty snazzy, so was wondering if a external ssd would preform on par with a internal ssd, only asking this is because if a external one is alright also I could boot it from where ever. Thanks for the help xD

 

[akaimetsuki]

Then again prices for external ones are pretty pricey compared to the internal ones lol

 

[WyomingKnott]

The main issue is that you could _not_ boot from it wherever, unless you have several machines with the same model of motherboard. The installation process loads drivers specific to your motherboard and specific components thereon, and a drive moved to another type of machine is likely to fail to boot.

That said: If you get an external SSD, be sure that the case uses the eSATA or USB 3.0 interfaces, or it will be slower than an internal hard drive and you will have wasted a lot of money.

The nearly universal practice among enthusiasts is to use an SSD internally, attached to an SATA III port on the motherboard, and use it as the boot / system drive. The reason is that SSDs cost a great deal of money per gigabyte, and the low-hanging fruit of improvement is startup and application load times.

(On the other hand, I have a colleague who does video editing. He gets more bang-for-the-buck by putting his current video project on the SSD, so that his editing, which is disk-bound, goes faster. This is an unusual case. Datacenters will buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of these to serve databases or Web pages, but most enthusiasts don't need that kind of throughput.)

 

[JohnnyLucky]

^5 +1 what WyomingKnott said.

We now have some motherboards with external, SATA 3.0 6Gb/s ports. Here is a link to an Intel cpu based motherboard chart that shows external SATA 3.0 6Gb/s ports and the SATA controller on the mothernboard:

http://www.johnnylucky.org/motherboards/intel-motherboard-database.html

It also shows which motherboard have external USB3.0 ports.

 

[akaimetsuki]

Best answer selected by akaimetsuki.

 

[akaimetsuki]

Thanks for the help, I decided not to get one since I cut my budget on my first build. 🙁