And how new are you to computers in general? I ask, because what you did, your setup with the OS on an external drive and personal data on the internal drive, is just completely backward and bordering on heresy I'm not trying to be rude or anything, I just can't see a use case in which it's a plus. As a matter of fact there's no upside, only downsides for an ordinary setup, here's why: When your motherboard needs to communicate with your OS, it has to do so through the USB cable... USB data transfer rates https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00024571 So if it's USB 2.0 (which is your "normal" USB port everybody got used to)... And if it's a USB 1.0... Fugget 'bout it! https://pic8.co/sh/fVpqeA.jpeg https://pic8.co/sh/S4mGvA.jpeg https://pic8.co/sh/0HNDSV.png https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/what-is-sata/ Besides, what matters is your personal data, not the OS itself. Your holidays pics, they are unique and can never be generated again if they are lost. As opposed to your system. So for the sake of easy data extraction/recovery, duplication and exchange, personal data should be stored on the external https://www.quora.com/Is-it-a-good-practice-to-install-an-OS-on-an-external-hard-drive?share=1 Is it a good practice to install an OS on an external hard drive? Irné Barnard, Been using and programming for computers since the mid 80s Answered 4 years ago · Author has 8.1K answers and 16.2M answer views Probably not, at least not for general purpose computing … external tends to mean USB mounted. And USB isn’t exactly the most efficient data transfer method, it’s got a lot more overhead than something like SATA. You do get eSATA externals, in which case this may not apply. Though the problem even after that is hardware related. The OS tends to get installed with specific drivers and settings related to the exact set of hardware in the machine. An external is just too easy to plug into something else where these may not work or cause damage. Some OSs (e.g. Windows) actively avoid allowing themselves to be installed on externals (or at least make it difficult), partly for this reason. There are some OSs which work fine on externals. Usually such things as most Linuxes and BSDs run without a hitch on these. Most even come with Live install versions meant to be run off a USB/CD/DVD without needing to install them on any drive at all. One place such “external” installation is used often is in NAS boxes: Rather than tieing up a SATA port on the box, the OS is installed on something like a flash drive connected through USB/PCI/M2/etc. even if that is still inside the box itself. It just makes more sense to keep the “necessary evil” of having the OS take up disc space on something as small as possible and not interfering with the drives which are the whole purpose of this machine. There’s probably other usages which may benefit from such non-normal internal installations. But the above example should indicate that it’s usually very specific, and not all users would derive benefit from such. More probably they’d find it just causes slow downs and / or extra problems. ... Anyway if you have questions, feel free to ask, it's not a waste of time to help somebody willing to learn linux, as far as I'm concerned