Can I Dual Boot with and external drive.

[DudeClayton]

I have a 100 GB hard drive that I don't use so i was thinking if I got a thing that would turn into an external drive and put a version of windows on the drive and dual boot it so I would not take space on my laptop. I need to know if this will work. Any Suggestions?

 

[clifford_cooley]

If your laptop has the ability to boot to USB, then yes.
Or if you can set the boot manger pointer to the USB, then yes.

However I personally wouldn't bother unless the connection was USB 3.0. For me USB 2.0 would be far too slow to even consider.

 

[DudeClayton]

If your laptop has the ability to boot to USB, then yes.
Or if you can set the boot manger pointer to the USB, then yes.

However I personally wouldn't bother unless the connection was USB 3.0. For me USB 2.0 would be far too slow to even consider.

What do u mean by slower and how much slower would 2.0 be

 

[clifford_cooley]

In addition to the chart SATA 3.0 is 6 Gb/s. HDD's are approximately the same speed as the first generation SATA, which is 1.5Gb/s. So you can see that USB 2.0 is only a third as fast as the standard HDD. And HDD's are such a bottleneck in OS performance, many people are moving forward and using SSD's which nearly saturate SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s).