Hard drives
25 Aug 2023 16:30:19 UTC
Topic 230004
(moderation:
I have a question about using a USB based drive for my OS...I am thinking of switching things up for a trial run and am asking which kind of drive I should use for a USB based drive for my OS? The prices of SSD's is dropping as is the price of USB 'sticks' and you can now get a USB 'stick' with 256gb for about the same price as a 250gb SSD drive...which would you choose and any suggestions on models or types to get or avoid?
This is a 64bit ChromeBook I'm going to try it on so upgrading the built-in drive isn't an option, the thing already has 8gb of ram, a 4 core Intel Celeron cpu and can boot off the 48gb internal drive or an external drive. I'm going to put Linux on the external drive just to make things easier. This is not a regular every day running pc, this will be for trips only and I would like to run Boinc on it but with the current setup it won't do that.
Thanks for any suggestions or ideas!
mikey
An option I also have is on
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An option I also have is on Amazons warehouse deals right which is 5 128gb usb sticks for $43US, I could put the OS on one and then clone the others from it so if one goes bad I just switch over to the next one.
https://www.amazon.com/Center-SuperSpeed-5-Pack-Memory-Keychain/dp/B0BKZ3LQTL/ref=sr_1_187?m=A2L77EE7U53NWQ&qid=1692981105&rnid=10158976011&s=warehouse-deals&sr=1-187&th=1
I've used 120gb SSD drives in the past for Linux with Boinc so I know it will work for me.
mikey
mikey wrote:The prices of
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Avoid USB sticks in general for that purpose, they are made to copy few files to them every now and than, not for constant writes from an OS + Applications, that applies even to quality USB sticks and not only to some cheaper ones sold in 5-packs or similar. They might be OK for some usual things, but in your case and in the long term SSDs will be a lot cheaper and a lot less maintenance intensive, compared to sticks they should last nearly forever, however perhaps you should currently avoid SanDisk, as they seem to have some issues and die suddenly.
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Link wrote: mikey wrote:The
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Thank you, that's kinda what I thought but was hoping that even the more expensive USB sticks would have come up in quality, I guess not though.
mikey wrote: Thank you,
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You don't really think that a package of 5 USB sticks at a reduced price would actually be of better quality, do you?
No, I didn't think so. :*)
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GWGeorge007 wrote: mikey
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No but a person can always hope, at some point those things just HAVE to become better in quality!!
I can only agree with Link.
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I can only agree with Link. I have some 2 TB and one TB USBs and they are not really the cats meow for even doing backups. I would definitely go with the SSD, but at todays prices, I would go for a 512 GB drive.
Allen wrote: I can only
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Thank you very much, this pc will only do crunching when I'm on the road and will never be my main pc for anything, it will essentially be a Boinc only machine that also has a web browser on it that i will use to check out various links etc to do things like this. So no documents will be created or worked on, no pictures to work on or create, no 'work' of any kind. I used to use a 120GB drive for my Linux Mint stuff but it kept predownloading 'updates' that meant absolutely nothing to me or what I do so I went to 250gb SSD drives and all the Linux pc's are doing just fine as i also figured out how to stop the predownloading of the updates.
mikey wrote:was hoping that
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It's not a quality issue, they are simply not made for that type of usage and hence their wear leveling isn't as advanced as that of SSDs. There are also differences between SSDs, QLC drives are absolutely OK for data storage but you wouldn't use them for write intensive tasks and probably not even for OS, there you'd use SLC-TLC, depending on the expected write loads.
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You could buy an M.2 SSD and
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You could buy an M.2 SSD and an external case for it, this is what I am using to run RPIs from. It will be much bigger than an USB stick, but it will have all the benefits of using a proper drive.
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stfn wrote: You could buy an
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I was really hoping someone would be doing that and say something THANK YOU!! So is it as fast as an SSD drive connected to the usb port or faster, or does it even matter at that point. And secondly does the case matter in the data transfer speed? I have a couple of older M.2 drives that I replaced in laptops because they were too slow or too small but are plenty big and fast enough for this application, I also have an older usb to M.2 stick adapter that I used to do all the data transfers with so if the enclosure doesn't matter then I could use it.