Should I read the data from portable external hard drive?

[Reeza]

SAS isn't running on your computer, your SSD or processor shouldn't affect your run times besides how long it takes to display the results.

[Reeza]

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@Kurt_Bremser wrote:

You can use the external drive for backup purposes, but for work, the internal drive is usually better. And nothing speeds a PC up better than a internal SSD drive.

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Check with your IT team before doing this. Data is now on your laptop, not in a secure environment and that often is against company rules. Your backups are also entirely manual and not 'backed up' so if your laptop is destroyed you lose it all. I don't back up to a local drive unless it's a learning or personal project, where I don't care if it gets blown away. Your program files are text and small enough to not matter. 

[Reeza · Accepted solution]

There are too many other factors to offer a conclusive answer. A SSD connected via USB 2.0 is less reliable than an installed SSD. A SSD on a network drive that's being scanned or backed up may be significantly slower to write to than an external drive. If you're only reading and not writing files it's different and it's different again if you're planning to redirect your full work directory to the external drive versus your local drive.
And if you're using Viya it's different again, as that supports in memory operations.

Most places that have a Server are usually connecting to a data warehouse or data server and there's well defined processes for the ETL so its usually not something a statistician or analyst would worry about. The cases where you require external data should be rare and should be smaller data files. Otherwise why would you invest millions in a software solution like SAS?