Linux on USB

[Matt Graham]

>> On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 4:36 PM, AZ Pete wrote:
>>> This PC doesn't have USB 3.0, will USB 2.0 be fast enough?

Probably.  It won't be as fast as SATA, but it took 58 seconds to rsync 
my ~ to a USB2 disk just now.  140G of stuff, 125M transferred, and this 
is a spinny disk--a flash disk might be faster because of no seek time.

On 2014-04-24 19:49, AZ Pete wrote:
> Any sites that explain how to install Linux to a USB drive such that
> the system would view it as a hard drive?

Any x86 from the last 5 years will be able to boot from a USB disk.  
USB disks all look like SCSI disks to the kernel.  As such, you can plug 
the USB disk in, boot from an install CD, and tell that install CD to 
use the USB disk as the place to put / and /home and /usr and all those 
things.

Note that flash disks may eventually wear out.  After 300,000 writes, a 
bit cell in a flash disk may not retain its value.  Wear-leveling 
algorithms in the disk's controller usually mean this doesn't happen 
until the disk is many years old.  Having swap on a flash disk and using 
swap a lot might accelerate this process though--I can't really tell as 
I've never put swap on a flash disk.

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