I've had the best luck with usb3 drives even if the computer only supports usb2.0.
You can just burn a bootable cd/dvd and install it as if it were a hard drive.
Keep in mind if you unplug it and plug in other usb devices it's device name may change so your best choice is plug it in the same usb port and set it as the first disk device in bios.

-- JD Austin
Voice: 480.269.4335 (480 2MY Geek)
jd@twingeckos.com



On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 8:58 PM, Matt Graham <mhgraham@crow202.org> wrote:
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.

--
Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress
There is no Darkness in Eternity
But only Light too dim for us to see.

---------------------------------------------------
PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss