I’ve been using some cheap flash drives for things like installing OSs and the like, but now I’ve picked up a Dell Wyse 3040 system to play with which only has 8gb of storage. So I’m installing the OS onto a flash drive permanently (don’t worry, just for messing with, nothing of value will be lost if/when the drive craps out).
However, the performance of my cheap flash drive is terrible and installing packages & transferring files is so slow. My question is: Would getting a better drive make a meaningful difference here? If so, anyone have some recommendations of drives they like that are fast?
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There are some fancy ones with SSD-features like wear leveling, though i don’t know which.
But why not a NVME USB enclosure?
Thumbdrive as main disk does work, but once i trashed a SD-card-as-home with compiling something, i gave up on the idea.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
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SanDisk usb-keys work.
You really want to use the thing for read-only, though, if you can:
the writes it takes to kill some portion of a filesystem, vs the writes you get before corrupting things, on a USB driver, don’t line-up.
Use NVMe as your 1st-choice for storage ( future purchases, obviously ), the fastest you can get, and be stunned by how much faster the same motherboard is, with superfast OS storage…
I’d stick /home, not /usr, on the USB.
As a general purpose USB (which not only works great for daily use as a thumb drive but also works with no issues as Linux Live or persistent USB) I can recommend the Sandisk Ultra line. I had them everywhere from 16GB to 128GB. They never let me down. The housing might look like it’s made from flimsy plastic but it’s surprising sturdy.
A second drive I’m currently preparing for use as a persistent Linux drive is the Samsung portable SSD T7. It’s nice and sturdy and the USB C to USB C interface allows me to easily run it on my Laptop without using up any of my precious USB A ports.
Here is one ultra sandisk for $12 per 256gb https://wwamazon.com/dp/B07SYRW97F/
For running an OS off a USB drive, I would recommend getting a USB to M.2 enclosure and putting an M.2 drive in it. This will give you better performance than any flash drive out there. The memory they put into normal flash drives is just slow slow slow for the use case of an OS.
Now, the only negative there is that is kinda expensive. If you really want to stick to a normal USB drive, maybe try this one out. But I would really like to stress that running an OS off a normal USB drive is going to be slow.
Use a USB 3. Speed means nothing for open media vault
You likely won’t notice much of a difference between SATA and NVMe when using the drive via USB, and many people have spare SATA SSDs, so I’d just grab a USB to 2.5" SATA cable: https://a.co/d/dQ5QXR1. You don’t need an enclosure because the drive itself is already an enclosure.
Don’t pay almost $20 for just a cable, pay $3 for this. it’s an enclosure you can put your 2.5in sata drive in to connect it with usb3. I have several, work like a charm https://a.co/d/8Z2VPso
