Railworks America

mdurdan wrote:Can I run an OS on an external drive?

You can, but the PC has to be set to "Boot from USB", not the default way (by internal drive) Externals are best for storing backups, large files.

Mike. Go to New Egg or CDW. Click on hard drives. Make a decision. They are all good.

mdurdan wrote:Would it run as fast as an ssd ?

Ummm, no way even the 10,000rpm Raptor drives (think over $400 for only 900Gb) can come close to the speed of an SSD. (actually prices of SSD's are dropping, a 1Tb Crucial is only $529 ) Do like Professor Buzzy suggested.

I know you are looking for a platter drive, but I want to interject a little about SSD. I have a mixed system with about 5TB of storage. I have the OS and a few programs on a 120GB SSD, a few more programs on a recently added 240GB SSD, and everything else - videos, music, photos, misc, stored on the platter drives. Program performance is amazing. TS2014, which is run from the 240GB SSD, is butter smooth. When I moved the program from platter to solid state, it eliminated the tile-boundry hesitation.

So, you don't have to sell the house and by a 1TB ssd. A small one to simply run your OS and programs would be sufficient to boost system performance a great deal. And, you can get a 120 for as low as $70.

I'm intrigued by the no stutter comment. I've been thinking about getting a HDD for some time now and that might just tip me over the edge. Which one do you have if I might ask? Installation sounds fairly straight forward..........right.

Both of my SSD's are Corsair Force 3's. And installation is the same as a platter drive. Connect the Sata connector, connect the power, configure your mobo to boot from the drive, install the OS, and go. I would assume that the reduction is stuttering is because of the faster read times for the SSD.