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?
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.
You can always grab a USB 3.0 disk case + NVME drive or 2.5 SSD, those will give you better performance for sure. Don’t buy pre-made drives, they’re usually slower than just getting a case and picking a desktop drive.
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/
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
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.
