4 ms·

Interesting, I did usb2 for a while on a pi3(?) and it worked decently well. Why is iops only 200?

• redundantly 2y ago
  It'll work, but for things like FreeNAS/TruNAS/OMV where there's a decent amount of logging occurring and standard activities need to be done (configuration changes, updates, etc) the poor performance rears its ugly head. As for the rPi3, you won't notice the difference, usually, between an external USB flash drive and the built-in MicroSD slot because they both go over the same USB controller. When you do notice differences it'll have to do with the quality and speed of the particular microsd cards and usb flash devices you use. The limitation of IOPs has to do with how the communication works and the limits to frame sizes and amount of frames that can be transmitted at the same time. The bus fills up quickly when lots of traffic is occurring. The USB 2.0 spec was released over twenty years ago. At that time the performance was incredible, but only in comparison to USB 1.x. If all you have available to you is USB 2.0 for your OS/boot storage, then by all means use it, however if you don't need to, if you can avoid it, don't use it. Leave those ports open for your keyboard and mouse. ;)