> A regular SSD has lower throughput of small files in exchange for high throughput of large files(slower throughput but higher bulk transfer) which is noticeab

> A regular SSD has lower throughput of small files in exchange for high throughput of large files(slower throughput but higher bulk transfer) which is noticeable if the USB controller was not up to the task (See most USB Drives which have this + flash controller on the same board) To a large extent that is a software problem. The installers/package managers are neither pipelining nor parallelizing their operations properly. If you're dealing with many small files then on the reader side you want to issue a window of readaheads for a certain size across multiple files rather than doing one file at a time and on the writer side you need to batch your fsyncs. > So that led to me wanting to benchmark a High IOPS drive and comparing it to low IOPS to see once and for all if the install process is choking on the drive vs something else (ie. the CPU capability for decompressing). Its just a weirdo side project that I wanted to try. There are PCIe slot to m.2 adapter cards, those are more efficient and cheaper than external adapters.