Can you use a portable hard drive on a dell laptop?

[Beth S]

[mahdi_jafarnia]

yes , why not ?
i have 3 portable hdd. 1TB USB3 , 1TB USB2 and 320GB USB2 and all of them work perfectly .

[Dell Inc.]

Hello Beth,
My name is Krishna and I work for the Social Media and Community Team at Dell. If its an external hard drive, it should work as long as it can connect to your laptop via USB or Firewire and you have the software.

It also depends on whether or not you are going to run the Operating System on the external drive. If your motherboard and the caddy can support Boot from USB device, then technically Yes, but in practice I'd strongly advise against trying it.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Dell-Kris K
Dell Social Media and Communities

[D]

Ironic that you should ask this question. I just did this about 6 hours ago. The answer is yes. I back up my hard drive from my laptop onto a portable hard drive every month (or week, as needed). This has saved my bacon on more than one occasion when I needed to re-install windows because I opened up an attachment with a virus in it. Sure I had to do a full reinstall of windows, all of the updates, and re-install any programs that didn't come with my laptop, but I have never lost data that I needed to keep because I do this regularly.