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?

  • MonkderDritte@feddit.deEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    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.

    [Thread #670 for this sub, first seen 9th Apr 2024, 19:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • Paragone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • K4mpfie@feddit.deEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • BombOmOm@lemmy.worldEnglish
    01·
    7 months ago

    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.

    M.2 Enclosure

    M.2 Drive to go in it

    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.