This is the perspective I was looking for. Thanks to all of you--Tie, Kerry,
Rick.
"USB is just too slow for vista for normal use...Even then booting
from a USB device depended a lot on the BIOS. On the majority of
motherboards I tried it didn't work...vista is slow even on sata II drives
let alone USB externals.. lol"
I suspected that this could be very bios dependent Kerry. Thanks for
confirming that. I had spent a lot of time trying to get Vista to boot from
an external DVD drive even using the internal HD, when the Beta first
cranked up and I had no luck at all, and had to put in an internal DVD
burner and even then reconfigure the cabling and some bios settings to
finally get it going but I learned from that.
I was trying to get a good perspective, and I knew I could get it here.
There are a lot of threads on
http://channel9.msdn.com forums where a lot of
developer types hang, and there wasn't really a definitive set of directions
for Vista; many people said they've done it for XP--but they didn't remakr
on speed.
I really appreciate the main overriding caveat from everyone--that the
troughput rate would be ***slow and that's the major deal breaker right
there. If it's going to be significantly slow, then just getting it done
***to see it on the external hd moving slow was not what I had in mind.
On one box I have a triple boot and it works very well, but my reason for
putting a Vista to experiment with or put betas and extra programs on the
external HD (a Western Digital My book that works like a charm and has freed
up a lot of space for me on my smaller internal HD) was that as everyone
realizes, some programs are increasingly larger these days, and some
programs still require ***major space on the system drive.
When the Beta first cranked up, and all kinds of nifty pocket hard drives
began to proliferate there were many questions about this to MSFT, and they
were very adamant they wouldn't support it because they wanted to stress
security and they didn't want people vulnerable to loosing their OS,
settings and possibly valuable documents if they lost one of the small
mobile HDs. Of course the statement they wouldn't support it prompted many
people to try workarounds immediately, but what's the good of doing it if
the system is going to cause you to wait for things to happen?
It's funny you'll see some people answer the threads on Radio 9 and say,
well if you have the right modern MOBO, you can set the bios to do this.
That's a little vague, and if I were able to do it and I were posting
directions and it was going to be slow going once they did it, I'd sure not
be shy about saying it was going to be slow so they could make the best
choice.
As real whole computers become smaller and less expensive, maybe the slow
throughput problem will be solved when those computers get into the form
factor size that all these nifty pocket HDs are in--I don't know if that's
possible, but I suspect that it will be some day.
Thanks very much for everyone's advice.
CH
