I am just about to set up my new Linux machine, which will be used to convert analog video and audio to digital video and audio. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t run the system off of a live USB stick (say, a good quality one from Sandisk), that is, without installing Linux on the hard drive and not setting up a boot partition, a system partition, and all that?
Mainly performance will take a hit. USB drives are also not really rated for consistent writes so you’ll find a USB dies quicker than a standard drive
I see. Well, scratch that then. 😅 Thanks! 🥰
You could buy an M.2 to USB enclosure and use a proper SSD NVMe as “USB drive” but I don’t really see any gain in it.
The gain is portability. I do this between repairing family machines. You can take your OS and near m.2 mobo speeds and get to work. Live USBs are needed sometimes but having what’s yours when you need it exactly where you need it is what matters in times of getting shit done.
Hear hear. It’s just my laziness 🤣
That’s what I do. I upgraded the SSD in my Steam Deck to a 1tb (before the prices went nuts, thankfully) and then ended up with a spare 256gb drive. I put it in an enclosure and installed NixOS on it as a sort of second system. It doesn’t really do anything super important, it’s more a learning project to get comfortable with NixOS without interfering with my daily driver. I could have just as easily done it in a VM but what can I say, I’m a tinkerer lol
I guess an SD card might be better. RasPis work from those for years just fine. Just don’t kill the power, power down nicely. SD cards are fragile on that
Interesting! Never thought of that, even though I am running three RPis 😅 I do have a micro SD card and a micro SD card to USB adapter… 🤔
Don’t if you value your data. Those are not intended for such tasks and will fail much sooner than your usual disk. Edit: read is fine, write is not
Running from USB usually means it boots from USB and then is stored on your RAM. If you don’t write to the drive at all, the USB will usually be fine.
I have XigmaNAS (FreeBSD) setup like that. Works fine if the OS is really small.
XigmaNAS user here… Only downside to that is that you will only find out the USB drive is bad when rebooting (happened to me once). But keeping good backups for the configuration makes recovering a 5 min thing.
Yup! I’m considering burning my config and distro to a CD-ROM. Impossible to alter on boot lol
My NAS happens to have a CD/DVD drive for some reason lol
If you have the ram for it, you could set it so that on boot it copies everything to ram and then you basically get the best performance at the cost of a few gigs of ram. Though it probably isn’t gonna be that much better than just an ssd.