I am posting this from a laptop with a bad SATA controller.
It is booted from an external USB3 drive and runs faster than when it was Windoze, so yeah. No internal HDD needed, but just a bad hard drive? So easy to swap if it is just that. Still run Linux and for when it is a Windows only program run it in a virtual machine Windows session.
Right on! Thank you for sharing that very important knowledge! I was not sure if it would or not. Fantastic!