I'm going to be getting a new work laptop with a regular HDD (I don't know the specs yet). The company is not providing SSDs, so I've considered purchasing an external SSD drive.
One note is that I can't reinstall the OS (Windows 7) but I can reinstall any of my applications.
Q1: Does it make sense to get an external SSD?
Q2: Will I get large increase in performance?
As much as this is more of an opinionated question, I don't think the price and the cumbersome attributes of the external drive make the slight performance benefit of programs to be worth it. Of course, it depends on the programs you will be running. For instance, if you're running SPSS and running a job with a large data set, you will be using more processing power than drive read/write speed. I feel like this would be the case with most of the programs you would be using.
The main advantage you will see would be program opening speed. That is when a program reads/writes to the drive most of the time.
For a good explanation, see this question: Is it possible that solid state drives (or any faster drive) will make common applications faster even if they are cached?
In short:
Q1: no, because:
Q2: not really.
I think eSata would perform the same as any internal sata drive and would therefore provide an excellent benefit over a standard hard disk. especially if you have sata 3. The only difference between internal and external sata is the connector. sata 3 at 6gbps works great with an ssd. Move your swap file to the ssd and install your most accessed applications and files on it.
To make it simple:
Q1: No, External SSD will not help in working faster, load Windows faster and all the other SSD drive's benefits.
Q2: No.
Hope this helps.
Regards.
