running a Windows 7 laptop from a USB flash drive

[techead]

sooo....

This possible?

I mean surely you can just set the boot priority and plug in the flash drive and install windows to it?

Cant put in a SSD as its a work laptop then they will wanna keep it lol

 

[shakes1]

I'm thinking speed will be a big issue, it may take forever to boot or perform any task!

But try it out perhaps?

 

[techead]

I'm thinking speed will be a big issue, it may take forever to boot or perform any task!

But try it out perhaps?

why would it be slow?

surely a flash drive is faster than a IDE drive???

 

[Gtx Gaming]

yes more then possible , getting it done is another problem.

flash drive is insanely slow if needs to do more then 1 thing, your windows will be slow

 

[Pada]

If the laptop has USB 3, then you can get a USB 3 casing for a SSD and then you won't notice a speed difference between the SATA 3 port and via USB 3

 

[Rudimental]

surely a flash drive is faster than a IDE drive???

What?

I think you're confusing flash drives with SSDs. What really makes SSDs fast is that they have controllers that allow them to write to multiple nand chips simultaneously. You can get flash drives with SSD-style controllers, but they are a lot more expensive than ordinary flash drives.

Also, unless you are using USB3, then you're going to have a bottleneck there.

 

[The_Unnamed]

But once windows has started up and is running if you do all your other work off the internal drive it will be fine. Just make sure you move the Page file off the flash drive otherwise it will be slow and it will kill the flash drive quick.

 

[shakes1]

Check this site out, goes into a lot of detail about transfer speeds:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/174836-32-sata-transfer-rate