Want to have hard drives for Windows 7 & Vista as well as my current XP, can I boot externally for Windows 7 & Vista or do they have to be internal drives?
It depends if your mainboard is able to support boot from an external device
Check in your mainboard’s BIOS or in the user manual if this feature is supported
My motherboard is made by MSI (PM8M3-V) - the on-board IDE:
- can connect up to 4 IDE devices
- serial ATA 150 controller integrated in VT8237R
- up to 150MB/s transfer speed
can connect up to 2 serial ATA drives - an IDE controller on the VT8237R chipset provides IDE HDD/ Cd-ROM with PIO, bus master and ultra DMA133/100/66 operation modes
Buy a PCI/PCI-E card with Esata.
Buy an Esata Case + Sata HDD
Tada! Your PC recognises it as an internal drive, and it operates at full sata (1.5Gb/3Gbps) speed
Using windows off a USB drive is excruciatingly slow.