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Boot Windows from External SSD on laptop?
So my friends laptops internal drive more or less died. The laptop is already super old but my friend cant really afford buying a new laptop (although I really encourage him to at this point). The idea now was to buy an external ssd like I have (e.g. the T3) which gives me really good speeds of 400/300 MB/s read/write so would be much faster than a regular sata hdd or whatever internal disk the laptop has. However on Tomshardware I read "Here is the other Design problem... USB3.0 is a Windows Software Driver and not a native MB Hardware communication device... Thus you would be connected at USB2.0 speeds too Boot." in a topic regarding this very idea. This implies I could acctually not make use of booting from the external ssd at all eh?
Comments
I tried and it worked fine for me. My laptop only supports USB 2.0 so I cant comment on 3.0 not working though..
But why not change the laptop's internal drive instead?
Might be an idea as well
But at this rate maybe a new laptop is really for the best 
If you just need to get the data out of the internal hard drive, you can use any of the live linux distros to boot from usb (assuming the internal HDD was not encrypted). Saves your friend from investing in the external SSD and use that money for the new laptop instead. Then format and reinstall whatever OS you want if the internal HDD is still usable. Of course this is just a temporary solution until your friend can buy the new laptop. Regular backups are very essential from this point on as the internal HDD
canwill fail again.It's not about the data. I saved that a couple weeks ago already using a linux live os. It is about keeping the laptop running now against the odds that its internal drive has been visited by the grim reaper recently. OS reinstall already happened. But the internal drive is basically useless. Starts up in 1/10 attempts.
If its just the internal HDD that is causing problems, and you already have the data, and your friend cannot afford a new laptop right away, then the best approach would be to just get a new HDD as suggested by @sanvit.
Guess we will try that then :P