I regularly restore to and query from a 500GB external USB 2.0 drive.

The best sustained data transfer rate I have seen is ~30 MB/sec, which is
about 15% that of a good SCSI RAID.

The databases are usually in the 50 - 100GB. With patience it is good enough
for a single user.

Keep the system db's - especially tempdb - on the local laptop hard drive.
If you plan on doing any writing put the tlog on the local laptop hard
drive.


<mrobins@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1161979342.604648.155240@i42g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...
> Does anyone have any experience setting up SQL server with the data
> stored on an external (USB / Firewire) hard drive.
>
> This setup would be used by 1 or 2 users for data analysis, it would
> not be intended as a production server.
>
> If anyone has tried this, I am interested in any idea of what size
> database (in GBs) could be analyzed effectively off of an external hard
> drive on a fast (dual-core) laptop.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Matt
>