External Hard drive usage question?

I have an external hard drive Western Digital WD1200bb usb2.0 drive and my computer has usb 1.1 ports, I've been thinking about buying a usb 2.0 pci card, but my question is would my external hard drive be able to handle all of the usage if I installed and ran some of my programs off of it? I'd like to do so but i'm worried about the drive failing because it's my backup drive all of my important info is on it.
Specs
Windows 98 (SE soon)
celeron 1.4ghz processor
intel 440BX motherboard
radeon 9200 video card (Pain in tha :rolleyes: )
448 MB of good ol' 100mhz SDRAM
6.4gb internal drive (too cramped can't afford to replace right now)

Me personally, I'd try to just stick to keeping data on the USB drive, install software to a local drive.

USB harddrives rock and are cheap to assemble
Standard harddrive and 1 of the new enclosures and away ya go
As to running programs off them no idea i expect they would run fine
But why would you want to?

The reason I want to run things off of the usb drive is that I have very little free space on my hard drive and i can't afford to replace my internal hard drive.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Loopy

The reason I want to run things off of the usb drive is that I have very little free space on my hard drive and i can't afford to replace my internal hard drive.

---

Ok .. fair point - but then I'm sat wondering why you don't take your external drive to bits & swap the drives around ? - mounting your larger drive in your machine & (for now) putting the smaller drive back into the enclosure ..

(if you open up most usb external drives, you just find an ide disk sat there plugged into an ide to usb converter which you can just unplug)

{oooo ! :( .. Edit: ... check what size hard-disk your motherboards bios can 'see' before doing this, & if you don't understand what I mean by that, then ask :))

[QUOTE=confus-ed]Ok .. fair point - but then I'm sat wondering why you don't take your external drive to bits & swap the drives around ? - mounting your larger drive in your machine & (for now) putting the smaller drive back into the enclosure ..

(if you open up most usb external drives, you just find an ide disk sat there plugged into an ide to usb converter which you can just unplug)[(/QUOTE)]

I can't do that because It will void the warranty (it expires next month)
If the drive enclosure breaks down after the warrenty ends then ill take the drive out.

Oh and about my bios supporting only certain sizes explain that in a little more detail please? I have an intel 440bx motherboard and the only bios upgrades I can use are the packard bell ones.

Oops...... sorry about the "Quote mistake" my html skills are sorry

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Loopy

..Oops...... sorry about the "Quote mistake" my html skills are sorry..

---

I can't even match up brackets, so I wouldn't worry about the odd extra character mucking up any formatting, as long as you are making yourself understood (which you are :)) then there's no issue ;)

Quote:

---

Oh and about my bios supporting only certain sizes explain that in a little more detail please?

---

There's a whole load of techo babble behind this that's discussed in detail here , but for most people, the net effect is that you need to be sure that your bios has support for drives beyond certain values. The main ones to be concerned with are 8gig (then it requires 'Init 13' support), 33.8 gig (which is to do with maximum cyclinder counts supported) & what is a really a software barrier (not a hardware limit) 137 gig (beyond which to get reliable transfer you need a bios that understands 48 bit lba, which most modern ones do & have an operating system capable of running it - so w2k 'on').

Even if your motherboard doesn't have appropriate support in its bios for larger drives, you can get around those limits by adding a pci controller card (from about £10 up) & connecting your drive to that.

Generally I'd say this will be less troublesome in the long run (either pci card or 'fixing' bios), than trying to run programs from a USB disk, that you also use for other things.

I just use my 120gb external for data backup. Cheap to assemble.
Remember to get a good USB2.0 card, or prepare for some horrible times.