No Problem Jim. You might try an external hard drive and have a different experience than me. There are probably a lot of variables that will give a different outcome. One thing i found that made a difference is when I made a separate partition dedicated for the operating system. The first time I installed windows 7 on the external I did not do that and when I loaded a lot of files on the hard drive, running 7 was noticeably slower.

If you don't need your optical installing another internal would be the better option. I cannot do that because I have no optical drive.

Ken, I installed Win7 on my 3.0 portable hdd and when it gets to the boot screen, it BSODs on me. Any idea why?

I might know. I will send you an email.

I run 4 USB 3.0 3 TB externals from my HP all-in-one with little to no slow-down in transfer speeds.  Well if there is it's barely noticeable.... like a millisecond if that. 

Being that it only has a 120gb SSD internally, I have to use external storage for my music, skins and documents, so you can well imagine that I'm moving files quite a bit to keep my OS drive uncluttered.  I can move quite large files quite quickly to an external drive, but then I do use Teracopy rather than the native Windows utility.

As for running an OS from an external drive, I once ran Ubuntu from a WD 500 gig portable drive [USB powered] and had no issues with lag at all.  However, Windows [of any flavour] is a much heavier OS, so I imagine a powered external would be best.   I do have a portable 500 gig external to give it a try, though.

I agree with what you are saying starkers. My seagate is not a powered external but I do have a couple I could try to see if there are any speed differences. Its hard to imagine that speed would improve over what I have now.

Does it make sense the way I installed windows 7 on the external by creating its own partition? I made a large partition just for the operating system 80gb but I do not store files on that partition. I use the rest of the hard drive for files. I found doing it that way made the operating system run faster than my first attempt where I just cluttered up the hard drive with the OS and my large music files.

A powered external only further restricts the portability of a laptop. I would never choose that option.

Portable may be slower, but screw a bunch of cords, and having to be near an outlet, etc.

Laptops are about portability.

BTW, I get my HDD caddy today ( via the miracle of amazon prime one day shipping ), to replace the optical drive, and I already have the SSD in the laptop, fully installed with Windows 8.1, and fully updated.

I'll let ya know how the caddy deal works out later.

So I take it you never got Windows 7 past the blue screen? I realize the article link deals with a different symptom but the root cause is the same. Windows 7 did not come default usb3 drivers so they need to be updated the way the article explains by Updating and replacing the boot.wim and install.wim files. I have an iso with it already done.

I would still want to use the caddy. It was never intended to dual boot. It is storage space.

I haven't given up on the Windows 7 external yet. I got your email, just been busy today.

I'll respond to your email shortly, thanks, Ken!   

Caddy was only $8.49. Not bad.

It works flawlessly. I now have the SSD I took from another PC, for the OS drive, and a 1 TB drive in the caddy replacing the optical, for storage.

Faceplate from the optical went on just fine, so it looks just like it came from Dell.

That is awesome, sounds like a worthy upgrade for my old HP laptop.

When i say that a powered drive may be better, it's not so much speed that I was thinking of, but moreso  consistency and reliability over USB powered.  Thing is, I never had an issue with booting/running Ubuntu on a portable, and obviously you are running Win 7 okay, so maybe there isn't a lag issue with the newer USB 3.0 drives.

I agree with you, Jim, a laptop needs to be clutter free when out and about, and I usually take any additional files, etc on a couple of 64gb sticks, so the powered HDD was more an in-home thing for dual booting, which is not something I'd imagine finding a need to do while at the drs, etc.