Running your OS (always) from a USB

[lid73]

Since flash drives are now pretty cheap and getting quite huge, I was wondering if I could simply run my computer's OS permanently from a USB 3.0 stick. This would then free up a sata connection on my motherboard for a storage drive.

Would there be huge drawbacks to this? USB3 is listed as 5 Gb/s and sata3 is 6. Would I get the same or similar performance in terms of speed, booting up, etc? Also, I run MS Office and Adobe products from my current SSD and all other programs are on a traditional drive.

Please let me know if there are any other pitfalls to doing this.

Thanks in advance.

 

[ninaholic37]

I was running my OS from USB2 for a few months, then put it on my HDD, and didn't notice any speed increase (I think booting for the Flash drive was a little bit faster). Only reason I put it on my HDD was for convenience (not having anything sticking out of my laptop). My guess is that your USB3 stick will feel about the same speed as the SSD.

 

[HOSED]

I created a bootable USB 2.0 stick with unetbootin http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ for Ubuntu 14.04 and set up 2 GB for space to preserve files ... and it works great on an ASUS G73JH (USB 2.0 connection ) . I was very surprised and this has saved me the hassle of partitioning my HDD and setting up the driver for the ATI card.
I have never tired this with Windows.
What OS do you guys use?

 

[lid73]

Currently I am on Windows 7 Pro. I am building a new machine, however, and was considering doing the OS on a stick to save a SATA spot.

Do any of you run other programs off the stick? If I load Office and Adobe stuff on the stick as well, could I completely replace my SSD with a thumb drive?

 

[Jovec]

Flash drives will never replace SSDs at comparable performance levels. Small file writes will be very slow depending on the drive type (slower than HDD). For specific use systems sure, but I'd hesitate for general use.

You can see some benches here.

Compare the Patriot Xporter USB3 to the Patriot Supersonic Xpress. Drive size accounts for the larger sequential reads and writes, but small file writes are bad across both.

Compare a WD Green or black drive to the Xporter.

Then compare against simply adding one of these (or similar) for more Sata ports.

 

[lid73]

Jovec:

Thanks for the links. So the read/write speeds don't even come close to an SSD. Makes sense why this is not done. Appreciate the insights.

 

[Mushkins]

Jovec:

Thanks for the links. So the read/write speeds don't even come close to an SSD. Makes sense why this is not done. Appreciate the insights.

Performance aside, there's also the major risk of something bumping the USB stick and it falling out or losing its connection. It's not like a live CD where it's all running from RAM at that point, that would be the equivalent of trying to hot swap your primary partition. At *best* I would expect to instantly bluescreen and lose everything I had open. At worst i'd expect filesystem or windows corruption forcing a reinstall. Pretty big risk to take for really no benefit, and I certainly don't trust my cat not to bump the USB stick in his travels around my desk.

 

[skankinstein]

For 3 years I've been almost 100% installation free. All you need is Win2USB and then all the portable freeware you need. If you prefer a suite, here you go. And anything can be re-baked as portable via Cameyo.

 

[lxskllr]

I've done it using Debian on USB2. It was kind of pokey, but perfectly usable. GNU/Linux is especially suited to doing that since you don't have activation nonsense, and it's more forgiving of being booted from different machines. I wouldn't do it unless the particular features of a flash drive outweigh the performance decreases, and other drawbacks of using that form factor.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Mmmm. . . There was -- or is -- some feature of windows touted around the time of "VISTA" called "ReadyBoost" -- maybe I have the wrong name for it. You would install a USB2 thumb drive by klooging a cable to a motherboard USB plug.

Once I tried to save a DVR capture to a thumb drive and play it back. This was USB2. Totally unacceptable.

You'd think with USB3, you might have comparable speed to an SATA disk.

But this isn't one of the things that's "on my plate" and list of priorities today.

 

[pw257008]

ReadyBoost is a small cache addition, meant to boost application performance similar to the random read/write benefits of SSDs. It's not the same as booting off USB. For ReadyBoost, I use SD cards instead of USB sticks since I hate them sticking out of the laptop.

 

[Deders]

Wouldn't it just be better to have the OS in the case and any additional storage drives that there aren't enough ports for on USB?

 

[jsalpha2]

I have one of the tiny USB drives (Sandisk Cruzer Fit USB2) that is the same size as the Logitech nano receiver. I don't see them in USB3 speed. The cat could not knock it out. I have heard that using a flash drive for running your OS will wear it out faster. Don't know for sure. I'd like to see one that came with a padded metal clamshell case (think miniature pocket watch style) that could fit on a keychain.

 

[onething]

It's true, running an OS on a flash drive will wear it out much faster. OS' do lots of reads and writes, flash drives are usually formatted in fat32/exFAT specifically for less I/O.

 

[MongGrel]

I'll pass, personally.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I'll pass, personally.

Why bother replying if you are not adding anything other than your personal decision without reason? Trolling?

BTW, I've run Linux Mint via a Sandisk Cruzer on a USB3 port and was surprised how robust it was. I even was able to do the updates without hassle.

And some environments (e.g. FreeNAS) demands a flash-based via USB to run. Not the best performance in question, but considering all things not terrible.

 

[vailr]

Windows 8 Enterprise Edition officially supports "Windows to Go" but only on certain "certified" USB thumb drives and also one model of WD portable 500 Gb hard drive.
The idea being: have a bootable and portable USB office environment. Those "certified Windows to Go" USB thumb drives are minimum 32 Gb, and cost several times more than non-certified drives of the same capacity.
There are some work-arounds for non-official portable USB Windows installs.
http://betanews.com/2014/01/13/run-...ly-from-a-usb-drive-on-any-computer-for-free/
Ubuntu 14.04 can also install and run fairly well from an at least 4 Gb thumb drive (8 Gb recommended).

 

[sm625]

I ran win XP off a USB 2.0 flash drive. It ran just fine with EWF enabled. Running 7 without EWF would be a different story entirely... 7 is very bloated and very hard on your storage.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Wouldn't it just be better to have the OS in the case and any additional storage drives that there aren't enough ports for on USB?

That depends.

Less savvy "mainstreamers" tend to get two categories of "persistent" and "volatile" storage mixed up: "programs," and "user-data." If you want to draw a profound demarcation between one thing and the other, you would separate the two things with different storage media. For instance, I no longer store accounting, PDF, spreadsheet, "documents" and similar things on my workstation: I store them on my server and access them directly.

I might also have the option to create two stores: a local one and a server copy, and I might be able to "sync" the folders so that changes to one are eventually replicated as changes to the other.

If I had a multi-use system or I wanted to use multiple operating systems, I might find "hot-swappable" boot-system disk(c)s of great use, even as I couldn't actually swap them after system post and boot-up. The risks of losing a connection were mentioned, but those risks can be minimized. In any case, keeping the data separate facilitates use of more than one OS or software installations to access the same thing, where "the same thing" isn't buried on another OS boot-disk, or alternate file system.

 

[kurt454]

Since flash drives are now pretty cheap and getting quite huge, I was wondering if I could simply run my computer's OS permanently from a USB 3.0 stick. This would then free up a sata connection on my motherboard for a storage drive.

I would rather just boot from a flash drive and run the entire OS in ram like Puppy Linux does.

 

[Deders]

Just leave this here...

http://hexus.net/tv/show/2014/06/Corsair_GTX_USB_3_0_promises_SSD_like_speeds

 

[postmortemIA]

great info, thanks. It does take a whiel to complete installation due to low sequential write speeds of usb drives