Running Windows 7 on RMBP from external?

[Callumbear845]

Does anyone know if I would experience a drop in graphical performance on windows 7 on boot camp if I ran it off of a portable USB 3.0 hard drive instead of the internal SSD? I plan on playing Battlefield 3 but dont want to cut out space from the paltry 256GB I have. Specs in signature.

 

[Himecchi]

Kinda curious about this as well. I've never actually used boot camp before but wouldn't you be able to just create it as a bootable partition on your usb drive and then hold down ALT while launching to select it? Something like that?

 

[leenak]

I looked into it a while ago and it didnt seem possible. The thing is that even if it was doable, I wouldn't expect a game to do it. The performance would probably be atrocious.

 

[getthesand0ut]

give it a shot. i use this all the time for working with different linux programs. there is a windows 7 one on there somewhere.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/

 

[CountSessine]

USB 3 is great for sustained transfers but for small reads and writes its as bad as USB 2 was. I don't know about windows 7, but OSX's boot involves a lot of small file reads and writes and when I've booted OS X from USB 2 drives, the boot up was painfully slow - far worse than the difference in transfer bandwidth between SATA and USB 2 would suggest.

As for games, It'll depend on the game. If you can boot windows from a USB 3 drive, once you've booted, started the game, and loaded the level, as long as it fits in ram and isn't paging out, maybe you'll get comparable performance. But if the game needs to stream assets off the file system and into memory in-mission, the game will probably be unplayable.

If this is really what you want to do, I'd suggest getting a Seagate goflex thunderbolt adapter. Thunderbolt bests USB 3's large file transfer speed, and doesn't sacrifice small file reads and writes.