Booting from an external hard disk

[mimp]

Sorry if this has been covered, did a quick search and couldn't see anything.

My old motherboard just died, and browsing through the manual of the one i've got to replace it, i just noticed there's an option to boot from a USB HDD

Sounds like a good deal - If it works a 4m USB2 cable would leave the hard disk outside my room where i wouldn't hear it, and save me the expence of the small internal 2.5" boot HDD / big external 3.5" HDD combo i originally had in mind.

Before i throw some money at an external enclosure or adaptor of some sort, is anyone doing this already? Is there a significant performance hit? I'm using the computer for audio work which isn't massively demanding but if things are slowed down too much i'll be reduced to a stuttering wreck.

[kesv]

Is there a significant performance hit?

USB2.0 can reach a speed of 480Mbit/s. That works out to 60MByte/s. So in theory it won't limit the transfer speeds of a single harddisk. However, if you look at tests of usb hdd-enclosures at places like Tomshardware, you can see that only a few of those enclosures manage to get close to the theoretical speeds. Another drawback of USB is that it increases the latency of your data access.

All this is not that bad when doing big sequencial data transfers, such as backing up your data, but is probably noticable in general usage. Still if you don't do anything too read/write intensive it could work for normal desktop usage. Can't really say how it would work with audio work, but I suspect the increased latency might cause problems. Depends on if you do multitrack recording and such.

[nici]

How about something like this? I have my raptor in a enclosure, and soon it will be screwed to the bottom of my desk connected with one of those and its still technically an internal HDD but it doesnt have a direct path of noise to my ears.

My Lacie design by F.A. Porsche 250Gb USB HDD wich has a seagate inside has a 34Mb/s transfer rate, claimed by the manufacturer and tested with HDTach.

[MikeC]

Actually, if you have a back panel SATA connection, you don't need an external HDD enclosure at all. Just a silencing box like the Smart Drive will work fine as long as the cables will reach. Then set it on a bit of foam and you're good to go. Should be no affect on speed whatsoever.

[nici]

What i meant by enclosure is one of these, two aluminium heatsinks with some very dense foam at the ends for dampening and on the sides for screwing it in place. These keep my Raptor at ~35c idle with zero airflow, thats 12c above ambient.

The drive in the picture is a SpinPoint.


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v307/ ... i/hdd4.jpg <--big picture


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v307/ ... i/hdd1.jpg <--big picture

[mimp]

Right, well if i'm doing my maths right a 24bit stereo wav file at 44100kHz is 258Kb/sec, so 34Mb/s should allow me to have over 100 on the go without any problems. That's a silly number really as even the most ridiculous project doesn't get that bloated. I'm not planning on doing any direct from disk sampling or anything so latency shouldn't be a massive issue from the audio point of view.

I'm a little concerned the OS will run very slowly, but i've got a decent amount of system RAM so hopefully once i'm up + running it will be ok.

Think i'll give it a go and see as i'd rather get it out of the room then faff about with trying to get it quiet, don't fancy my diy skills too much and dont want an overheating hard drive.

Do any external enclosures take SATA drvies yet? if so i'll get one of those in case i wind up on plan b.

Thanks for all the replies, and apologies for the delay in thanking you all. installing the new board wasn't as straightforward as it should have been..