Hello, I am looking to purchase a external drive to boot windows from. I purchased a drive a couple weeks back and the sector size ended up being too small. (I am somewhat knowledgeable about computers but this is way over my head) Is it a requirement that the external drive I purchase is a SSD? or can I get a significantly cheaper normal external hard drive?
It depends on a number of factors, but the biggest one is if Windows recognizes the bus and can boot off of it. I have the Samsung T3 drive and it works well on my MacBook Pro booting Windows 10.
As for the block size, almost all external drives expose the physical block size as 512 (though internally it is probably 4096). If you migrate a Winclone image using block based cloning from a new USB-C MacBook/MacBook Pro/iMac (2017), the external drive needs to be 4096 physical block size. That usually leads to problems since the exposed physical block size is usually 512 for external drives.
To resolve this, you can use WInclone in file-based cloning mode, and it shouldn’t matter what the block sizes are. The only hiccup in this is that file-based imaging has an issue with Windows 10 Creator’s update which results in problems with the start menu and Microsoft Store apps.
tim
So would you recommend buying that exact drive(the Samsung T3) and then follow a tutorial on external booting?
yes. that is what i would recommend.