External USB Flash or SSD Drive

Over the past say 5 years, I have had chronic issues with my laptops. I have had primarily Toshiba and now a Lenovo. Its very frustrating not knowing if your PC will boot up on any given day. My Lenovo is only 5 months old and is having problems. It is not virus or malware related. OK, that's as brief a history as you can want.

My question is can I get a 128G 3.0 flash or SSD drive and load my stuff on that drive and run from there? I was initially thinking only data but why not MS Office and Quickbooks as well. This would keep my laptop as generic as possible so I could 1) use one of my old laptops as a spare and 2) a restore would be so much easier and faster and as you can imagine less stressful. I would obviously back up this drive to my WD external hard drive.

Thanks for reading this and I look forward to the responses.

 

It depends on your Notebooks connectors and support in the BIOS if it provides boot options.

If your BIOS supports boot from the ports you connect the eSATA or USB memory to yes.
If your NB has a cardbus or expresscard slot you can boot from it if the SATA-, SAS-controller is boot capable.

In my various HP business notebooks I had anything from internal SATA (drivebay), mSATA to eSATA, USB 2, USB 3, Thunderbolt, expresscard SATA-, SAS-controller. Only for the firewire did I not find a boot option so far.

 

Yeah you can install software to an external drive. Software like office would probably not even run slower. Some programs might be a little slower running through an external usb 3 ssd vs your internal ssd. But you could also keep using the internal ssd that you have and just back that up constantly.

Basically, making everything external doesnt really make it easier.. when the drive dies it dies, just like your internal drive..

 

Thanks for the replies. I'm not looking to boot off the drive. I just want to be able to do a recovery without the hassle of moving all my stuff. I guess that if I ran Office or any other program off the external drive and did a recovery, I'd have to reinstall it as the registry would be cleared.

I'm looking at Amazon.com: Verbatim Store 'n' Go 128 GB USB 3.0 External SSD Solid State Drive 47622: Computers & Accessories

Or

Amazon.com: Kingston Digital 128GB Data Traveler 3.0 USB Flash Drive - Green (DTIG4/128GB): Computers & Accessories

Thoughts?

 

What about Windows to go? Windows To Go

 

Windows to Go looks very cool, unfortunately I believe all my problems are Windows related. I'm not sure this would solve my problems. Thanks for the post.

 

I use a Mushkin Ventura Ultral 240 GB (paid 112€ which a USB 3 SSD stick, which has an metal case. It it is warm to hot when in use, but not to hot to be untouchable,as for speed as fast as my internal Intel 530 mSATA, but presently from what I found the fastest USB 3 stick.

 

This is a huge can of worms. I'll run you through the process, requirements and potential traps along the way.

1. Requires Advanced BIOS booting support. Most Laptop BIOSes only support basic USB booting (USB keys and such), precious few machines can support booting off an NTFS partition which is preferable for good SSD performance on Windows 7-8. I've yet to see a machine that can boot off a WD external HDD let alone a custom adaptor with an SSD.

2. Precious few adaptors are now available that can fully support the UASP protocol for USB3.0. You will probably be running with reduced performance, especially higher latency due to USB signalling.

3. Assuming you can boot off the drive, you have another issue. USB3.0 SSDs also require UASP drivers for maximum performance. Thus far, only Windows 8 supports UASP natively, and thats on the OS for an attached storage device. If its Windows 7 then you have to find a way to chainload the USB3.0 UASP drivers at the very start of the Windows boot process.

4. Garbage Collection and TRIM. Thus far, the OS cannot issue TRIM commands to the SSD via the USB3.0 interface, this means that unless your SSD has an extremely aggressive GC scheme, you will suffer old-school SSD performance degradation.

5. Technically, what you described can be achieved with a Windows 8 OTG installation on a USB flash drive. However, you will have to manually manage the drivers as you migrate between your laptops. Plus points 3-4 still apply if you are going with a native USB3.0 flash drive. Points 1-4 apply if you go via the Adaptor route.





In a laptop, there are four most common modes of hardware failure: (in my humble experience having to fix hordes of relatives'/friends' machines) For some reason, OEM machines are especially susceptible, almost to the point of me suspecting that its planned obsolescence.

1. HDD failure: the most common because OEM Laptop HDD reliability is bad enough, but place them in an enviroment that moves (thus shaking the head) and has very limited ventilation. Buying a reliable, proven SSD (e.g. anything made by Intel) usually mitigates this issue beautifully.

2. LCD failure: usually dead pixels, this happens most commonly in the first month of usage and during the final months after 3 years. Can't do much about it except replacing the LCD. Thankfully if it happens early (infant mortality) then most decent companies can replace.

3. Heat Failure: related to poor maintenance usually but exacerbated by poor access or hardware design by the manufacturer. Usually on a model by model basis. Can be avoided if proper research is conducted (usually by popping ideas here at Notebookreview) before purchasing.

4. Motherboard component failure: I've once had an Acer Laptop get totally buggered by a dead CMOS battery, Windows VISTA's clock simply would stop working. Unfortunately, this model hid the CMOS battery between the motherboard and the keyboard thus requiring a complete disassembly to change.

Honestly for that effort, just shoot ideas at us before buying a laptop. As for a preferred laptop? I'd buy a Clevo laptop with an Intel SSD and call it a day. The Clevos are not the most brute reliable, cheap or sexy but they are the most maintainable if something goes wrong.

 

Marksman,

As I posted above, I have no intention of booting from the drive or loading an OS on it. Also, I believe all my troubles are Windows related not hardware. I've had many different brands over the years and the issues seem to be consistent. I'm tied to Access for my business so I'm pretty much stuck with Windows, although I'm not sure IOS is any better. Thanks for the post.

 

Oh my bad, anyway, the quick jist from my ramblings.
yes you can run stuff from an external SSD. However, there is still the issue of No TRIM on the drive.
This is a hardware level issue since the IC that handles the SATA-USB conversion (usuallly an ASMEDIA or Renesas device) is incapable of passing the TRIM command to the drive even if the OS supports it.

Secondly, there is also the issue of UASP being required for maximum performance.

What kind of problems with Windows? I found most of my issues with Windows pretty much disappear when I get an SSD.