Boot from new External Harddrive on Acer?

Hey guys and girls,

I just bought a Rosewill eSATA/USB harddrive enclosure, Seagate 7200.10 SATA 320gb harddrive, and Rosewill eSATA expresscard/34 for my Acer 8204WLMi.

The original goal was to run some programs off of it, and keep it as a backup, but I have a few questions.

Can I boot from this drive if I install an operating system? What would i need to change on my internal system settings to allow this?

Also, a friend said that no matter how fast of a drive I put in my computer, it will only run as fast as the slowest drive in my computer. Is this also true for external drives? (Internal is 120gb 5400RPM SATA drive, external is 320gb 7200RPM SATAII drive)

 

Can I boot from this drive if I install an operating system? - Only if BIOS supports booting from the ExpressCard slot...and I don't think any laptop does. But you can certainly try.

What would i need to change on my internal system settings to allow this? - Again, that would all be in BIOS.

Also, a friend said that no matter how fast of a drive I put in my computer, it will only run as fast as the slowest drive in my computer. Is this also true for external drives? - What? Anyway, the drives will run at their designed speeds if that is what he meant. Your external will run at 7200RPM, and you'll be able to run it at full speed with whatever available eSata bandwidth you'll get.

 

Thanks for the response. What my friend was trying to say was if I had a desktop computer with 3 harddrives: a 10000rpm, 7200rpm and 5400rpm, the computer would only work as fast as the 5400rpm drive. Who knows...

Anyway thanks again. Is there any software I could put on my internal drive so that once started, I could switch over to the external drive and run an OS on it?

 

Since it has USB, you can certainly boot off USB by changing your boot priority in the BIOS.

 

USB is rather slow though, not recommended for running an OS off of it. Except maybe Linux.

If you have a need to run two OSes at the same time something like VMWare could do it (run one OS on your internal drive, but the other externally), but there is no way to just say 'oh, I'm gonna switch my one OS to the external drive now'. Sadly enough

 

Your friend is misinformed, the drives will run at their designated speeds provided the interface with the motherboard is not limiting them to slower speeds. the drives will work independantly and the rpms will be what they are. the only way the 10,000rpm drive will be as slow as the 5400rpm one is if they are transferring data between them. without such interactions, each drive will be as fast as it is meant to be.

with RAM what your friend says would be true, but not with hard drives.

 

You can't install Windows to an usb or FW HDD.

 

Crap, oh well thanks for the help I really appreciate it guys. It looks like the only way I'll be able to take the most advantage of the new harddrive speed is by running programs directly from it.

 

Even if you run apps from a drive that spins faster than your internal drive, it will perform slower than your internal drive as it's bottlenecked by the USB interface and your CPU. Firewire drives are faster, but external HDs are mainly used for data storage. Maybe it would be best if you installed the programs you run onto your internal drive, and used the external drive to store all your documents.

 

Did you even read the OP's post? He's using eSATA. In that case, yes, programs will run faster in your external HDD. If you have a slow internal HDD (like a 4200 rpm HDD)