Hi All,
I have a question, is there any kind of cable that will run as internal sata to USB? i.e. If I were to take out my internal laptop sata hard drive and plug a cable to the sata connection inside the laptop and the other end USB to connect another hard drive? Is there any cable made in this way? The idea is to take my operating systems on my sata drive to use in different computers that I use at work and home without having to keep opening up the computers.
Is there any way to rewire a sata input connection inside a laptop or desktop so that a cable runs from that sata connection to the built in USB port on the computer?
I have read about an XP installation booting from a USB but it is very slow because it is actually running through a USB cable to a USB port but there should not be a problem with speed if it is rewired so that the computer does not recognise the device as USB but instead as an onboard sata drive.
A big part of the reason XP loads so slowly from USB is because those builds tend to be very generic, and thus, they have to load a lot of drivers...it is almost like doing the last step of a windows install every time you boot. I think you might have a lot of issues with your plan unless all your systems have identical specs.
USB to SATA converters are common; they even make them designed for internal use; with the motherboard USB header connection to make things easier.
Going the other way is a lot less common, in fact, I don't even have a link to such a device. It should be possible, but I have never seen it. However, I have seen several SATA to ESATA adapters, and ESATA is better than USB for hard drives anyway (well, it is better if you ignore the fact that most computers don't have ESATA ports).
But again, I think the initial idea is fundamentally flawed; it would probably work well if you were using Linux, but I don't think XP would be too happy...and windows vista/7 would be very upset if it started at all.
