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?
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.