Question about using an external SSD as primary boot drive

I know this is possible, but I’ve heard some conflicting stories as to whether this is advisable in terms of efficiency and practicality and would like to hear from anyone who has experience with the following:

I have a 3-year-old Windows desktop and would like to upgrade to an SSD for faster boot ups. The problem is that it’s an all-in-one PC and the housing cannot (should not) be opened to replace the internal hard drive, so I want to plug an external SSD into a USB3 port and boot from there while using the internal hard disk for regular document and media storage.

I understand SATA would give me the fastest read/write times but I’m hoping USB3 won’t be too far off. The conflicting comments I’ve heard is one camp says there should be no problem with this set up, while the other says that speed degradation would not make this worthwhile and that I might be better off by just restoring the internal drive. I’ve also heard that it’s not a good idea to use an external drive as a primary boot, (although I’m not sure why.)

Any comments on using an external SSD this way?

Installing to a USB device apparently requires the Enterprise edition and a certified device: http://mobile.betanews.com/betanews/#!/entry/run-windows-8-or-81-directly-from-a-usb-drive,52d3ead6025312186cb6e4cb

Apparently you do not need Enterprise Edition, just a little tool called WinToUSB (tutorial).

If the inside hard drive is a moving platter one, using a good external USB3 SSD will PROBABLY be faster, especially if the internal HDD is a low-end 5400 RPM laptop hard drive like a lot of all-in-one computers tend to have. It won’t be as fast as a SATA-connected SSD. While USB3’s theoretical max throughput is quite high, you also suffer from latency and bandwidth issues from both the chipset and the USB protocol.

If I were you I’d look for a Thunderbolt or eSATA part on the computer, and if you don’t have that, find a fast USB3 SSD (or build your own from a good SSD – their performance varies WIDELY) from a place that takes returns. Try it out and see how much of a performance boost you get.

A cheaper interim solution is to just get used to putting Windows into sleep mode instead of shutting it down altogether, and then use a USB2/3 drive you have lying around for ReadyBoost, which caches often-used data on a flash drive so your computer doesn’t have to wait for your slow physical hard drive to spin to the right places.

There at least two reasons why it is not a good idea for an external drive to be used as a primary boot: firstly, external drives usually rely on a slower interface than drives on the SATA bus, and secondly, external drives have more points of failure than drives housed in the PC. Generally you want your OS drive to be the fastest and most reliable in the system because it is used constantly.

If you were debating between installing the SSD internally or externally and were choosing externally just because it seemed easier in the short run, that would be a poor choice. Choosing between an external SSD or an internal standard drive is much more understandable. While the USB interface will keep the SSD from being as quick as it could be, it probably would still be faster than the older drive.

By using the USB interface, the SSD is also losing functionality such as Native Command Queuing (NCQ), and Trim, which will keep it from running optimally. Given the lack of Trim support, at the very least you should pick an SSD that does its own garbage collection, so you do not experience substantial performance degradation down the road.

Out of curiosity, what’s the model of this PC? I’d be surprised if the hard drive was completely inaccessible. Even though the all-in-one design probably makes it harder than it should be to replace the hard drive, it has to be possible if only because spinning-disk hard drives can have lousy reliability.

(Are there even any glued-together all-in-one desktops?)

I’ve replaced drives in all-in-one PCs. Go for it.

Ditto, many AIO models just need a couple screws and the back panel pops off revealing most of the innards in a fairly accessible way.

Thanks for all the input so far, but even on here there seem to be conflicting opinions. A summarized consensus seems to be it’s not the best solution but it will work for what I’m trying to do in my limited situation…

This post was very helpful, thank you. Just to clarify, the internal hard drive is a disk, rated at 5400rpms at that. If I could get inside safely I would just exchange it with an SSD. But again, maybe not… because its capacity is 2TB and I wouldn’t be able to exchange it with a comparably sized SSD.

I don’t know if they sell them outside of Japan but it’s a Sony Vaio VPCL22AJ. I understand it’s not impossible to get inside of anything, but I know they are not meant to, although a couple of posters above say to go for it:)

Maybe I’m going about this the wrong way. If I can get inside the PC, I would be able to exchange it with an SSD and then house the original hard disk in an external case and use that as storage. You guys have given me a different way to look at this!

You should be able to do it without much trouble. Straight from Sony:
VPCL2 Series Hard Drive Replacement

Yep. That is the way to do it.

There you go! Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.

You may need an adapter, but they are cheap. And, of course, you are going to have to either clone your existing drive to the SSD, or install Windows anew. But at least now the path is clear.

Huh, go figure. I could not find anything on the Japanese site. Cheers for this!

At work I’m using Windows 7 pro on an i7. If I plug a Good USB stick into a Good USB port on the machine, Windows offers me the choice to use it as a boot cache, to speed up booting.

Since all my usb sticks are the cheapest possible, and my computer is a Dell, this never works: Windows tries it, then declines.

In using SSDs overall real world performance gains beyond faster boot times are fairly modest. A lot of PC work done is in RAM anyway and writing to an SSD is often a lot slower than reading from it. It will be somewhat faster overall but it’s not going to going to be as big a deal overall as you may think.

Well, it’s a 3-year old pc and it’s time for a fresh restart, and if I can improve performance for the fraction of the cost of getting a new pc by installing an SSD, I think it’s worth it. I’m looking for faster boot ups but that’s not all; less heat, quieter operation, quicker read/write. I’m not expecting a rags-to-riches difference. Moderate performance improvement is enough. I have another device with SSD and I’ve been spoiled with its performance:D

USB3 has a theoretical speed of 5Gbps but I don’t know of any USB3 devices that reach that speed. Apparently USB3 just has to be faster than the USB2 speed of .48Gbps. Also USB devices can cause high CPU usage.

SATA3 is 6Gbps and can probably come closer to that theoretical maximum than USB3 will. SATA seems to handle more of the I/O tasks on the controller rather than the computer’s CPU.

Between those things and the fact that an external drive would be more vulnerable outside the computer case and has a separate power supply, I would go for replacing the internal drive.