OT: Would you ever run an EXE from within a USB attached hard-drive?

[rasputin1963]

OT nerdy, dumb question that I'll bet y'all can help with:


I just bought a Toshiba 1.5 Terabyte external hard-drive which plugs into my computer via USB.


Question: Would you ever install and run an executable from within one your "add on" external drives? A tiny utility EXE, sure, no problem, but what about your larger footprint softwares, e.g. Cakewalk, Photoshop, Sibelius, etc.?

Do these necessarily need to sit, and run from, the principal hard-drive built in to your computer itself?

Thanks, ras

[techristian]

if you are looking for portability, im sure that the install will still be to the c: drive. all of the files may be on the usb, but the keys will be on c:

dan

[wesg]

Provided it had enough IO bandwidth to perform acceptably....I don't see why not. Just don't expect it to work on multiple computers.

[philbo]

Sure, why not? USB drives work great for that. If it is a stick ( thumb drive) yoi moght not wany to run a drive reliabilty test though... those things wear out after about a million writes.

[elsongs]

if I wanted a virus...SURE!

Srsly, don't they make portable apps for that very reason?

[TimOBrien]

Originally Posted by rasputin1963

Do these necessarily need to sit, and run from, the principal hard-drive built in to your computer itself?

No.

Now if you want to talk about maximum efficiency from a daw the best setup is:
a) os, apps and plugins on boot drive
b) sample libraries on a secondary separate drive
c) audio projects and tracks on a third separate drive.

But that is to keep the housekeeping and services on the boot drive from interrupting the smooth flow of data from the sample libraries and project audio.

Otherwise, a drive is a drive is a drive and your computer doesn't care where a program is launched from.

[philbo]

Originally Posted by philbo

Sure, why not? USB drives work great for that. If it is a stick ( thumb drive) yoi moght not wany to run a drive reliabilty test though... those things wear out after about a million writes.

Sorry for the typos - I did that post with my phone.

There is nothing inherently bad about running an .exe off a removable drive. The devil is in the details:
- have you scanned the file for malware?
- is it an installer (setup) program?
- is it from a trusted source?
- have you ever used this drive in an untrusted computer?
- is the 'tiny utility' a drive partition eraser or hard drive formatter?

With any .exe you have to use your head, regardless of where the program resides.

[blue2blue]

Originally Posted by TimOBrien

No.

Now if you want to talk about maximum efficiency from a daw the best setup is:
a) os, apps and plugins on boot drive
b) sample libraries on a secondary separate drive
c) audio projects and tracks on a third separate drive.

But that is to keep the housekeeping and services on the boot drive from interrupting the smooth flow of data from the sample libraries and project audio.

Otherwise, a drive is a drive is a drive and your computer doesn't care where a program is launched from.

That said, it's important to remember, your ancillary drives mus be of adequate performance capability to receive any benefit -- and to prevent an actual performance slowdown.

Many people buy a 7200 RPM USB2 drive and think it's going to perform as fast as a 7200 RPM drive sitting in the SATA or internal IDE bus. That's not likely -- unless your main drive is improperly set up. In my experience, USB2 drives perform less than half as fast as the same drive on an internal bus -- and I have moved drives back and forth from inside the desktp machine to inside the USB2 boxes and tested. My WD IDE and SATA drives get around 54 Mbps, my Seagate SATA gets about 48 -- when they're inside the computer. When they're in one of my USB2 boxes they get 22 and 20 respectively, as I recall. They're all 7200's.


BTW, not all applications that run in Windows have to go through the sometimes nasty installation process. It's typically more among smaller programs and utilities, but many apps, particularly directly from the developer and Open Source community, run as 'portable' apps that need no installation, have no footprint in the Registry, and can be placed and run from anywhere on the machine.


One last thing... if you BUY a USB (particularly a no-name brand or from a fly-by-night vendor) and find a program on it -- it's probably best NOT to run it.

That said, malware-infected USB thumb drives typically hide the nasty stuff so you don't see it anyway.

But, fortunately, MS turned changed the old default to turn off auto-run from thumb capability in Windows, so getting jacked just by inserting an infected thumb drive isn't as common as it was in the middle of the last decade -- when something like 1/3 of the US military's (and private soldier's) computers in-theatre were estimated to have been infected by spyware on cheap thumb drives that *someone* flooded the markets of Afghanistan and Iraq with. And, in that context, spyware is really spyware.