Newbie Question Running VB in External USB Hard Disk

[vbqwejst]

Can I run VB in an external USB drives? Would the performance be acceptable? Is there any known compatiblity issues with usb drives?

Sorry if this question sounds trivial. I am new to VB and is planning to buy an external USB drive solely for using it so want to double check before investing money on the hardware. I want to carry my own harddisk with me and startup my private virtual machine anywhere I go, on any PCs I can access.

Thanks for your advice.

[mpack]

VB itself must be installed in the host OS since it relies on device drivers for important functions. VMs can be located on external drives, but this is not reliable IMHO on Windows hosts because the drive letter assignment is liable to change. Performance will be poor: USB drive performance is usually 25% to 20% of internal drive performance - and that's mechanical drives. Flash drives are even slower and not really suitable for use as an OS boot drive anyway.

There is no compatibility issue when using a USB drive in this scenario. This scenario involves the host using USB to access a file on a drive, so any problems you may see being discussed having to do with guest USB are not relevant.

[BillG]

It really depends on what you want the virtual machines to do. For most of the things I use vms for (OS and network setup testing or proof of concept) storing the virtual hard disks on an external hard drive is quite satisfactory. You will only really feel the slower disk access if you are running disk intensive applications in the vm. SQL server would be a no-no, for example.

As mpack pointed out, the VirtualBox application itself must be installed on the host OS. You can't just plug in an external USB drive and away you go without installing anything on the host OS.