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Ask HN: Working off of a bootable USB drive

I'm wondering, how usable would it be working off of a Linux OS installed to a USB flash drive, and carrying your work with you. I often want to work on my laptop in my own room, but it's only good for certain workloads. For other workloads that demand more memory or a better CPU I use the shared desktop with lots of RAM and a quadcore CPU in the living room. It's not handy having to upload all your work to Dropbox, then logging in on a different computer, downloading the work, unzipping, moving the files to the htdocs directory, the Documents folder, etc, then continuing work, and again uploading it to the cloud after finishing, especially if I have to quickly move computers... Did anybody try such a thing, and do you have recommendations for a good USB drive which is fast enough and won't wear down quickly from lots of writes to it. Thanks!

pvtmert 10y ago
u can of course but i dont think it will be suitable for your needs, usb drive may bottleneck speed however you can use shared drives/mounts between pcs (afaik theyre on same net) so u can mount your drive one of your pcs, while others being shared. so your work will be like in that computer
CarolineW 10y ago
I've done this in the past and it's always been very usable, although you need to be aware of the limitations. Any time you read and/or write to the USB you get hammered on speed, so you need to make sure everything you need is loaded into and running from memory. I know some Linux live installations do this by default - you need to check. The only other thing is to make sure you save your work!
- milankragujevic 10y ago
  Thank you for your response! Yeah, I have a 32 GB USB drive that writes at 25-30MBps and reads at 60MBps, though I don't know the random 4K times. Additionally, I always religiously save my work and clear write cache because my village looses power often so I have to save the data often in case it happens.
  - CarolineW 10y ago
    I've run by booting from a 2GB Ubuntu Live Distro, and then used a 32GB drive for data. I then copied the USB data to the machine, and regularly ran rsync in the background to keep the RAM and USB in sync. I'm sure there are better solutions, but any shortcomings were minimal, and it was easy to set up, easy to use, and reliable.

pvtmert 10y ago

u can of course but i dont think it will be suitable for your needs, usb drive may bottleneck speed however you can use shared drives/mounts between pcs (afaik theyre on same net) so u can mount your drive one of your pcs, while others being shared. so your work will be like in that computer

CarolineW 10y ago

I've done this in the past and it's always been very usable, although you need to be aware of the limitations. Any time you read and/or write to the USB you get hammered on speed, so you need to make sure everything you need is loaded into and running from memory. I know some Linux live installations do this by default - you need to check. The only other thing is to make sure you save your work!

milankragujevic 10y ago
Thank you for your response! Yeah, I have a 32 GB USB drive that writes at 25-30MBps and reads at 60MBps, though I don't know the random 4K times. Additionally, I always religiously save my work and clear write cache because my village looses power often so I have to save the data often in case it happens.
- CarolineW 10y ago
  I've run by booting from a 2GB Ubuntu Live Distro, and then used a 32GB drive for data. I then copied the USB data to the machine, and regularly ran rsync in the background to keep the RAM and USB in sync. I'm sure there are better solutions, but any shortcomings were minimal, and it was easy to set up, easy to use, and reliable.