Posted: 5/28/2015 8:06:47 AM EDT
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I'm planning on playing with Linux again.
I need a 8 or 16gb flash drive that's fast enough for me to put Mint or one of the Ubuntu family on it and boot from it. Assuming I'm on Newegg's site looking at flash drives, what are the specs that matter for my application? Thanks |
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Quoted:
Does the machine you're playing with have USB 3.0 on it? No Researching transfer rates. Did it a few times on my computer just for shits and giggles. Used a Puppy Linux flash drive for a month while waiting for a replacement WD drive. Lost that flash drive. Trying to find out what's the latest and greatest. I'm getting a free laptop sans HD. Thought it might be fun to tinker with Linux again. |
I recommend Sandisk CZ80. It's what I use. It's about twice $/GB as the cheapest you'll find. But it has the following benefits:
With any system that boots off USB (copy-to-ram or not), USB transfer rates are usually going to be the bound on boot time; to significantly decrease boot time you must increase the USB transfer rate. I've had to toss multiple cheap ADisk and Kingston flash drives in the past because of corrupt sectors that can't be fixed, causing a failure in a boot or install or data corruption, data vulnerability or possible FS corruption. So much for saving money. As to size, the min. and max depends on the lowest amount of RAM you expect on computers you'll be booting on, and how much you'll be keeping on your root device fs. I would not recommend running off live CD with a ubuntu family distro with anything less than 6 gb RAM; at best w/o zram you can maybe whittle root device fs down to 2.5gb. That doesn't leave a lot of room for GUI apps if you're just operating with 4gb ram. If at some point in the far off future you decide to use RAID1 for reliability, double the USB size recommendation below. At lowest 8gb of ram AND the root device fs will never have > 3.5gb data: use a 4gb flash drive. At lowest 16gb of ram OR the root device fs will never have > ~7gb data: use a 8gb flash drive. At lowest 24gb of ram OR the root device fs will never have > ~14gb of data: use a 16gb flash drive. etc. etc. |
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Are you going to be installing it? If so just any flashdrive that is big enough seems to work. I've been using an old ass one with no issues, but I do want one of those portable SSD's one of these days. Eventually I'll be installing it. The laptop I'm getting has no HD. The owner wanted the HD in a USB enclosure to use for his movies. |
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I use a bootable Linux USB flash drive daily. I recommend a USB hard drive instead, and choose your file system carefully. EXT2 seems to give the best performance, over EXT3 or EXT4, when using a flash drive.
I wrote and article sometime ago on setting one up with encryption. http://fullcirclemagazine.org/issue-57/ |