Re: Debian using USB stick on diskless machine
On Tue, 29 Dec 2015 20:28:00 -0800
Rick Thomas <rbthomas@pobox.com> wrote:
> On Dec 29, 2015, at 12:51 AM, Ross Boylan
> <rossboylan@stanfordalumni.org> wrote:
>
> > The system is a bit sluggish; maybe ext4 on lvm wasn't the best
> > choice for it. Ross
>
> Make sure the USB stick you’re using is rated for USB3, even if the
> computer’s port is just USB2.
>
> The older USB2 sticks tend to be much slower at doing sustained
> writes (both random and large sequential) The newer USB3 drives will
> (usually) handle frequent writes better/quicker. It’s not the bus
> speed that slows it down — it’s the internal architecture of the
> FLASH memory. USB2, at 480Mbits/sec is 60Mbytes/sec, which is pretty
> respectable for a disk drive, if the drive handle that load on a
> sustained basis. The problem is that the USB2 FLASH doesn’t have
> enough buffering to keep that rate up for very long. The
> manufacturers have, for the most part, addressed that problem in USB3
> devices.
>
If you can invest a bit and can afford a much larger device, a USB hard
drive will work quite well. I have the smallest one I've ever seen, a
Samsung which is no longer made and has a mini-USB socket on the drive
PCB itself. But it's old, and now dropping bits here and there, so
I'm looking for a cheap USB-SSD at the moment, currently around 50GBP
for 128GB/USB3 here.
--
Joe
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