Installing windows on external HDD
Community Forums/General Help/Installing windows on external HDD
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| Is it possible to install windows on an external hard drive and then boot into it? More specifically boot into it from an iMac? Also, would this be to slow for gaming? Thanks! |
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| If it isn't possible, another option you might consider is create a really tiny partition on your computer to install Windows on (so that you're not taking away much space from OSX) and then use an external hard drive for data storage. That's what I'm probably going to do with my laptop. |
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| Don't know about whether or not it's technically possible, but it would definitely be slower than a built-in drive: A typical current-generation SATA drive pulls around 100MB/sec. I just happen to do some benchmarks on my own system: two identical drives, one internal, and one in a USB 2 enclosure. Internal: 105MB/s USB: 32MB/sec (USB 2 uses a shared bus of 480MBit/sec - after factoring in multiple devices negotiating use of the bus and protocol overheads, the best you'll ever going to get is around 40MByte a second or so. It's probably still usable, but would be very noticably more sluggish than a normal internal drive. At the very least, I'd expect windows to take three times as long to boot up from such a device. If you don't have a ton of memory in the machine, you're also going to be crippled when it start depending on the swapfile for virtual memory. |
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| Why not use Bootcamp or VMWare Fusion? |
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| Gfk: Bootcamp IIRC requires a partition on the main hard disk in the mac so you need to make a windows partition to use the external drive. It has been done but thats with disconnecting the internal drive and then installing windows on the external. TBH I do think you will need the small partition. |
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| Yeah, I guess I'll just go with bootcamp. Possibly triple boot mac osx, win 7, and linux at some point in the future.. |
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| It should be possible if you manage to get a e-SATA HDD to work with the iMac! http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/09/07/howto-add-esata-imac/ |
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| It depends on the moherboard and BIOS and yes some will recognise an external HDD as a boot device however making an external HDD your primary is probably NOT a very good idea. Darkheart |
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