Would a computer work if it didn't have a hard drive but used an external hard drive instead?

[Deleted member 1940107]

Not planning to do this anytime soon, but just curious if it would work.

So you've built a new computer but there's not hard drive or SSD, so you plug in an external hard drive to a USB slot. Would the computer boot and be usable like normal? Like would the OS be installed onto the external drive?

 

[DSzymborski]

While you can, it's a less-than-ideal experience.

 

[USAFRet]

Not planning to do this anytime soon, but just curious if it would work.

So you've built a new computer but there's not hard drive or SSD, so you plug in an external hard drive to a USB slot. Would the computer boot and be usable like normal? Like would the OS be installed onto the external drive?

Not really, no.
Windows has a real hard time just installing to an external drive.

There are methods to do it, but it would be massively slow.

 

[ArtPog]

Just one other thing...
While it is true that a Win OS cannot be directly installed on a USB HDD/SSD, a USBEHDD/SSD that is the recipient of the cloned contents of an internally-connected drive containing a viable OS can boot as an external USB device. For example, a few moments ago I cloned the contents of one of my 8.1 OS systems to a USBEHD and was able to boot to the USBEHD as if was an internally-connected drive. We've achieved this capability with the Win 7, 8.1, and 10 OSs.

BUT understand that this capability is something of a crapshoot, depending upon the disk-cloning program together with the particular PC system involved. To put it bluntly - sometimes it works - other times it doesn't.