Has anyone here tried installing Windows 8 to an external USB SSD drive and booting drive from a USB 2.0 port?
I also want to install Visual Studio 2012 kind of IDEs and programming related software in the USB SSD. Will they be responsive (as in usable) and fast (as in usable) as an internal HDD installation of Windows 8?
I also want to know performance of ubuntu 12. Should I go for USB SSD or USB HDD?(motherboard have SATA 1.5Gbps and USB 2)
It depends on the application. USB 2.0 speed is of course much slower than an SSD drive's speed, so if your program do a lot of reads/writes on large files, the result may sometimes not be acceptable.
But SSD has another advantage, that is super fast seek time. Visual Studio often accesses many small files in random fashion so it may still benefit from SSD's fast random IO. Windows 8 its own supports Windows To Go, which is recommended to run on USB 3.0 but also works fine on USB 2.0, so in general, the speed is acceptable.
I recommend to upgrade to a USB 3.0 PC, or install a USB 3.0 card. But if you really must to install an OS on USB 2.0, then try NTFS compression. It'll improve disk speed somewhat since decompressing speed is much faster than reading speed
It's possible, but it will not be as fast as an internal drive. The maximum transfer speed for USB 2.0 is 60 MB/s, of which 10-15 percent is overhead. Typical speeds are rather less. You're very unlikely to see more than 45 MB/s read and 30 MB/s write. The bus speed will limit you much more than the drive speed, so an SSD does not confer any advantage.
It's quite possible to boot a full OS from a USB drive - I do it with Linux, including Ubuntu, on a regular basis - although a bit slow. I have not tried Windows 8, but I expect it to be similarly slow but usable.
If you want to be able to use it on more than one computer, though, you will have issues with Windows activation, unless you have a volume license.
