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?
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.
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
Up to you… $20 isn’t much and StarTech is a trusted brand, so it was worth it for me. I don’t trust the cheap generic brands on Amazon as much.
USB SATA controllers are also very hit-and-miss. There’s plenty of really, really bad ones out there. Either missing features, slow, getting hot or all of the above. If you found one that works well, good for you, but I’d avoid most noname brands, unless I had specific knowledge about the product or the very least the chipset they use.
Yeah, I have one of those and it’s great but I need very little storage for this system (64g max) so I didn’t feel like it made sense in this case.
You could go with a 2.5in SSD in a USB enclosure. I think OP was just suggesting this as the highest performance option.
You won’t see much of a difference between SATA and NVMe (if at all) as the maximum speed for SATA (6Gbps) is higher than the maximum speed for USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 Gen1 (5Gbps).
The M.2 enclosure I have gets extremely hot during periods of extended use like installing an OS or transferring large amounts of data. Not sure if it’s a problem with other enclosures, but it’s something to consider.
Check the chipset maker. If it’s JMicro that’s the problem, they suck. Look for something with Realtek or Asmedia chipset.
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.
Yeah seems like sandisk ultra is the way to go. Do you know, is there any disadvantage to using the “Ultra Fit” line of smaller drives that sit much more flush to the case? Those look nice, but IDK if there are performance issues with the smaller package
Here is one ultra sandisk for $12 per 256gb https://wwamazon.com/dp/B07SYRW97F/
Yes, getting a better flash drive will get you better performance. Make sure you get a good USB 3 drive, and plug it into a USB 3 port. I’ve always had good experiences with SanDisk drives. Avoid the off brand drives. They’re often really bad or even fake.
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.
Do you have a spare SATA SSD? This is my go-to USB cable for connecting SATA SSDs via USB: https://a.co/d/dQ5QXR1. Works well on Raspberry Pi and it’d work well on a thin client too.
Note that the Wyse systems don’t have much CPU power as they’re designed to be used as thin clients (where nothing runs on the system other than remote desktop connecting to a server somewhere). That’s why they have so little space - they were never designed to run a full OS.
