Can you install Windows 7 to a SD card?

I have looked around the net a bit to see if this was possible, and I have received mixed feelings after my findings.

I recently purchased a new Toshiba Satellite that came with Windows Vista, and a free upgrade to Windows 7 on release.

I am wondering if I am able to put a 32GB SDHC card into the read slot and have it be considered my main hard drive that Windows is on, and use the internal drive (which I swapped out for a Scorpio Black) as storage.

Why, or why not?

Thanks guys.

No. Because the flash card is addressed via USB.

But, you can try. There might be a vhd trick.

Search the forum. PM ChuckR. You're welcome, Chuck.

How to install Windows 7 on a portable hard drive

Win7 installed to SDHC how?

Through usb it won't, through pcmcia maybe.

Better question, what's the point?

It will be terribly slow, because flash doesn't take simultaneous read/writes very well.
And SD has limited write cycles, so it will get bad quite soon, with all the reading writing being done by the OS.

Alas, you address the flaw. Even when successfully executed in a prior OS, the performance was substantially sub-standard.

Christopher - the speed limit is the USB, not the flash memory.

That makes sense.

My inquiry was more so for the future. Meaning the launch of SDXC ... having a 128GB SD card run as my OS based HD would be nice, and the transfer rates are supposedly going to be over 100mps. Seems promising, hence my questions.

Just a side note as well ... but this would not be a USB drive, it would be the card inserted into the onboard card reader.

Christopher said:

Just a side note as well ... but this would not be a USB drive, it would be the card inserted into the onboard card reader.

Which is on the universal serial bus.