[sf-lug] USB 3.0 Flash Drives - Penguin shaped and others

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

[shopping for USB flash drives]

> This is preliminary to the meeting notice for May 5th which will be
> out next week and may make some folks interested in getting a Flash
> Drive to run Nomad BSD or Knoppix from.

Ja, but...

USB flash drives are _painfully slow as main storage_, compared to an
internal hard drives or SSDs.  Although running a live distro from one
is very useful for utility purposes, to test-boot a distro, or to
evaluate Linux driver support for hardware, it's very suboptimal for
ongoing computer use, because of the mass-storage performance
bottleneck.

At a certain point, Bobbie, it's wise to, y'know, install an operating
system, and stop incessantly kicking tires and avoiding committing.

But if you want a minimum-commitment OS installation, I can recommend
installing into VMs (e.g., with VirtualBox).  For one thing, then you
can actually live with the installed OS, maintain it, make changes,
etc. -- but without dedicating the entire machine to that, and with the
ability to use the host and guest OSes simultaneously.