I'm borrowing someone's Windows machine, because my own box crashed and burned a while back -- back when Spotify was downloading and erasing a crapton of resources to its users' computers with every single use. Windows is incredibly irritating to me though, as I'm a programmer, and a lot of the areas I explore are locked down on Windows by default.
I'm looking into getting an external SSD drive, but I want one built to run an operating system on, not just store files. I know that all storage media has a read/write threshold before breaking down. What specifically should I be looking for to run Linux from a portable hard drive?
Also, I may eventually boot this drive from other computers. Are there any concerns over hardware drivers when going from machine to machine? I remember installing Ubuntu on my laptop one year, and though the live-CD allowed me to connect to Wifi, I had to install the drivers again for my wifi chip after install.