External hard drive - do I still need an internal one?

kaaloo

Been thinking about putting a pc together purely for multimedia purposes to connect to my TV.

Although I have put several PC's together in my time, Ive never used external HDD's.

Can anyone tell me if I still need an internal hard drive connected to the motherboard if I have an external one via usb?

As well as saving on cost, I also want the pc to take very little room so if I can skip on an internal hard drive it would be really good,

K

robt_2

Short simple answer is yes, you still need one.

It can be done without but is not advised, and extremely uncommon. It will only cost £20 for a small one, that is if you don't have an old one you can reuse. Im not sure how you would save space as I haven't seen a case that doesn't have room for an HD, even if it is a small (laptop) one.

kaaloo

Thanks for the reply Robt.

Looks like im gonna have to buy an internal one then.
As for how will it save space, good question!
Its not a conventional PC case. Its a project and will be in something really bizarre that wont be out of place in my living room - maybe a in fish tank or something!!

unrich

You could try a 2.5" disk using a converter.

Or I think there are even smaller disks available 1.8".

Or there are CF Disk to IDE cable converters though some converters will not allow bootable devices to be attached to them.

Some motherboards also allow booting from USB devices. You could load OS onto a USB drive and run it from RAM (an option for some linux).

deklan99

If you're feeling adventurous you could try GeeXbox . Whole thing boots into RAM so no need for a hard drive at all. Only 9 mb download so worth a try.

mdbarber

just had a look at geexbox but its still very early and no where near taht media center feel we are after yet, ide to compact flash is not a good option as the better cf cards that are acceptable as booting devices are expensive,]
Also if it is to be used as a pvr you will need plenty of free space for recording
usb whilst allowing booting would be a slow performer in comparison to sata, consider using esata but mainboards with this on are rare xfx do one i noticed for c2d
also check these out, have not ordered from this company but their prices are hot

TonyLisaP

If you have a dvd drive why not burn a Linux disk and boot from that? You can run linux without an internal HDD.

robt_2

TonyLisaP wrote: »

If you have a dvd drive why not burn a Linux disk and boot from that? You can run linux without an internal HDD.

My guess would be that if there is room for a DVD drive there would be room for a hard drive anyway

tomsolomon

You don't need to have an internal HDD. If your BIOS will boot from USB you can have your OS on a flash drive, also you could use SATA drives which are hot swappable (apparently,) and you could mount your SATA drives in an external caddy.
USB, SATA, either will work outside of the case.