How to use a portable SSD for a travel OS with Linux?
How to use a portable SSD for a travel OS with Linux?
Hello! The TL;DR is:
I have an m.2 drive that is in a sturdy enclosure that has 1 TB. I have Ventoy with Medicat on there, with some backups of important data.
I still have a lot of room left on there, so I was thinking what else I could do, and the idea of basically installing a Linux Distro to a chunk of free space on there. Maybe Debian/Fedora or Arch.
Is there anything I should be aware of to help not break that system or rapidly kill the drive? It's not a USB flash drive, it's a M.2 drive that's put on a small board that then allows it to talk via USB C/Thunderbolt.
EDIT: Just to be sure, if I use Ventoy's EFI, do I need to be worried about a conflict with the bootloader of the Linux install?
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Not really different than any other M.2 SSDs, that it's over USB doesn't matter.
The only consideration for USB sticks is that they're usually quite crap, so running a system off it tends to use up the flash pretty quickly.
But it's not a usb stick, it's an m.2 drive in an enclosure... So your second point doesn't apply
It indeed doesn't, its purpose is to show the differences and clarify why/where OP might have heard you need special care for portable installs on USB sticks.
All the guides and tutorials out there are overwhelmingly written with regular USB sticks in mind and not M.2 enclosures over USB. So they'll tell you to put as much stuff on tmpfs as possible and avoid all unnecessary reads and writes.
The only consideration for USB sticks is that they’re usually quite crap, so running a system off it tends to use up the flash pretty quickly.
not to mention that, due to the crap flash, they also tend to be quite slow and unreliable.
Definitely look for portable SSDs rather than flash drives. Different technology, usually significantly larger (physically). Easily saturates a USB 2.0 connection, so look for USB 3.0.
Back when Microsoft supported Windows To Go, they had a short list of verified drives to use. Surely outdated now but might be a good starting point.
FWIW I used to run Windows 10 off a Samsung T5. It worked fine, except that it would always shut down when I tried to suspend. Still works as far as I know, I just haven't used it in a long time.
look for USB 3.0
USB 3.0 (5 Gbps) is quite ancient by today's standards. I'd recommend a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) or even a USB 4.0 drive (20/40 Gbps) drive.
Good point. I can never keep my USB 3 naming schemes straight.
The faster nvme-based sticks can even exceed 3.0's 5gbps!
Seems right, but I wanted to double check my research before I fully committed.