Anonymous
I appreciate it the full explaination, rob. Sure, some I already knew but it is always good to get confirmation. And there was some I did not know and some I hadn’t even considered.
To the last point, your comment about USB3 started me thinking. Yes, my laptop can boot from a USB connected drive, at least in theory. I have two USB2 ports and one USB3 port. The USB3 port is color coded blue. I did not know that. Anyway, I plugged in the drive and ran some benchmarks to see just how fast things were moving. Low and behold, the external box with the SATA has a hardware interface that is only capable of running at USB1 and USB2. I removed the disk from the box and confirmed that it is indeed an SATA-III drive (throughput up to 600 MB/s). So my high speed disk plugged into a high speed USB port was being held back by the portable box hardware limitations.
I took the SATA-III 1TB drive out of the enclosure and replaced it with a 320GB SATA-II disk (throughput up to 300MB/s). I’ll use it for transferring files.
I have just ordered an external enclosure that promises USB3 speeds. When it arrives, I’ll put the 1TB SATA-III drive into it and proceed with the antiX installation.
I’ll pick this thread up again at that point and we’ll see how it goes.
Thanks again for the help.