I was planning of buying a new 40 gig external harddrive ( parallel & USB 2.0 ) and installing windows xp & windows me on it.... I'm little afraid: are external hard drives too slow for a normal utilisation... & what is the difference between the speed of internal and external devices... Here is the website of the hard drive I'm talkin' about: http://www.micro-solutions.com/product_info/hard/lit-037.html Thank's

EIDE drives, with most are these days, run at around 16mb/s. A USB 2.0 port runs at 3.1mb/s, so an external drive will be a good deal slower overall. You'd be better off with an internal drive for running OSs off of, plus they're cheaper than external.

Yes, I removed them. This is not a place to berate, it is a place to learn. We all make mistakes in are post, it happens. I've done it myself. A simple post stating the actual speed of USB 2.0 would have made the point. For more infomation on USB 2.0 visit the link. http://www.usb.org/developers/usb20/backgrounder.html Now, play nice :) KTTD

"External" hard drives fitted in drawers which connect to EIDE connectors are available, usually from local PC builders. These can be any hard drive and will perform exactly the same as an internal hard drive. I have used this system for many years for transferring data between the systems I use. The only caution is that you have to be careful not to drop or shock a hard drive as you bring it from place to place. Lacie and Iomega have new external hard drives which run on Firewire and USB 2 and can slip in your pocket. These are great, as they are shock resistant, but are better suited to the transfer of data only, as stated above, for speed reasons.

OK, Playin nice here. Actual speed of USB2 is 480Mbs. The speed of USB1 is 12Mbs. As you can find out here. http://www.usb.org/developers/usb20/backgrounder.html Now for the fun part. The specs on the drive that you chose run at 3.1Mbs!!! Now that clears up the misunderstanding of the speeds. This would cause poor performance of a O/S installed on the drive, But if you wanted to try it just to see why not. (I know I would) The only problem there would be getting your PC to boot to the USB port. I do not know of a BIOS on a motherboard that can support that. So lets go another route. Use a DOS bootable internal drive (or even a floppy disk) with a DOS based USB driver to enable the USB port and "mount" the drive to a letter. Then using a boot menu or the boot loader for windows XP you could posiably load the O/S from the USB drive.