External hard drive durability

Hello my forum members!

Today, I was wondering about the Windows 8 To Go. I've done it on a USB flash drive and performance was ok. It booted up pretty quick, general usability was great as long as I wasn't installing something and trying to Photoshop at the same time. Other than the space issue, it was ok.

But ok isn't enough.

So I was wondering, I could do a Windows To Go drive on an external hard drive since the transfer speeds between flash and hard drive is like three times faster than flash on USB 2.0. There then comes the question, how durable are external hard drives for portability? I know they have their faults, and I have experienced those faults. But would you think external hard drives could last a year or so in a Windows 8 To Go set up?

Thanks!

Aren't constant writes a bad for thumb drives? I would think an external hard drive would outlast a thumb drive in that respect. How well it does being banged around in your backpack is another matter though. Powered down with the heads parked I would think it should be pretty resilient to the odd bump. I've been tempted to setup a Windows to go install myself. The largest thumb drive I have is 16 GB and its in use for something else. I do have an old 80 desktop drive in a USB enclosure that could be used. I might have a go at this this weekend and see if its any good.

A lot of people seem to like to go. ( People have doing it with win7 for quite a while already).

Unfortunate it will only be for enterprise customers.

alphanumeric said:

Aren't constant writes a bad for thumb drives? I would think an external hard drive would outlast a thumb drive in that respect. How well it does being banged around in your backpack is another matter though. Powered down with the heads parked I would think it should be pretty resilient to the odd bump. I've been tempted to setup a Windows to go install myself. The largest thumb drive I have is 16 GB and its in use for something else. I do have an old 80 desktop drive in a USB enclosure that could be used. I might have a go at this this weekend and see if its any good.

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A lot of writing on flash is bad....it does make it fail.

I've used a Windows 8 To Go drive since the Consumer Preview everyday for five days a week and I used it about a few hours total of usage. Before that, I had Windows 7 on it. After maybe a 10 month period, the flash drive has finally started to fail with Windows asking to scan for errors and repairing them at boot up in 8 from time to time and Windows Explorer doing that as well when plugged into a puter. I would figure with laptops more mainstream, technology is better than a few years ago with the 2.5" hard drives.

I'd love to hear how the performance on that is. I remember shut downs took a while and saving huge files was a pain on flash.

Would a USB 3 flash drive perform better on a USB 2 port compared to a flash drive built for USB 2 specs?

The drive I plan to use is a 3.5 inch 7200 RPM IDE desktop drive. The enclosure is USB 2. It's not small or really all that portable but its all I have to play with at this time. A lot of the 2.5 inch mechanical laptop drives are only 5400 RPM. They use less power, generate less heat, are smaller, and are ideal for external enclosures. They are also slower in performance. You trade one for the other. If you go with a 2.5 inch SSD drive you get the best of both worlds. Compact, energy efficient, and fast.

I think I might try out a USB 3 flash drive since they're quite fast and are recommend for Windows 8 To Go use, and they're like a dollar a gig, which is great! I believe they might use the same flash as SSDs also...