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Run Linux from USB and use storage only for... storage: yay or nay (and why)? (piefed.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone to c/linux@lemmy.ml
49 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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I am just about to set up my new Linux machine, which will be used to convert analog video and audio to digital video and audio. Is there any reason why I shouldn't run the system off of a live USB stick (say, a good quality one from Sandisk), that is, without installing Linux on the hard drive and not setting up a boot partition, a system partition, and all that?

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[–] MajesticTechie@feddit.uk 51 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Mainly performance will take a hit. USB drives are also not really rated for consistent writes so you'll find a USB dies quicker than a standard drive

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 10 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I see. Well, scratch that then. 😅 Thanks! 🥰

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 19 points 1 month ago (3 children)

You could buy an M.2 to USB enclosure and use a proper SSD NVMe as "USB drive" but I don't really see any gain in it.

[–] OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 month ago

The gain is portability. I do this between repairing family machines. You can take your OS and near m.2 mobo speeds and get to work. Live USBs are needed sometimes but having what's yours when you need it exactly where you need it is what matters in times of getting shit done.

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 month ago

Hear hear. It's just my laziness 🤣

[–] CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

That's what I do. I upgraded the SSD in my Steam Deck to a 1tb (before the prices went nuts, thankfully) and then ended up with a spare 256gb drive. I put it in an enclosure and installed NixOS on it as a sort of second system. It doesn't really do anything super important, it's more a learning project to get comfortable with NixOS without interfering with my daily driver. I could have just as easily done it in a VM but what can I say, I'm a tinkerer lol

[–] thenextguy@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

If /home and /var are on disk and not USB then it might be ok. The rest of the os is typically only written when installing or configuring things.

Try it, might be fun.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Also the smaller OS's (puppy linux, tailOS) that can run entirely in RAM are going to be fast when it comes to anything but disk reads.

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 3 points 1 month ago

I also thought about running from RAM but I guess the transcription might be needing the RAM too. So that route probably depends on how much RAM there is available

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 month ago

OS's

It's just "OSes", and it doesn't need to waste an apostrophe. They're going extinct, you know.

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

In such a scenario, do I create mount points for them or is there some other, preferred way of pointing to them? Symlinks?

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Mount points in fstab

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's not a deal-breaker or anything tho. Just not for something long term. Totally feasible as something quick and dirty tho.

[–] NochMehrG@feddit.org 1 points 1 month ago

Yes, I did that for a while some years ago. It was fine. Good enough for using it in a training. And I lost interest in that setup early enough that the stick survives to this day.

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I guess an SD card might be better. RasPis work from those for years just fine. Just don't kill the power, power down nicely. SD cards are fragile on that

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Interesting! Never thought of that, even though I am running three RPis 😅 I do have a micro SD card and a micro SD card to USB adapter... 🤔

[–] Mihies@programming.dev 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Don't if you value your data. Those are not intended for such tasks and will fail much sooner than your usual disk. Edit: read is fine, write is not

[–] TeaWithDani@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Running from USB usually means it boots from USB and then is stored on your RAM. If you don't write to the drive at all, the USB will usually be fine.

I have XigmaNAS (FreeBSD) setup like that. Works fine if the OS is really small.

[–] Tumbleweeds5@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

XigmaNAS user here... Only downside to that is that you will only find out the USB drive is bad when rebooting (happened to me once). But keeping good backups for the configuration makes recovering a 5 min thing.

[–] TeaWithDani@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yup! I'm considering burning my config and distro to a CD-ROM. Impossible to alter on boot lol

My NAS happens to have a CD/DVD drive for some reason lol

[–] Alvaro@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 month ago

If you have the ram for it, you could set it so that on boot it copies everything to ram and then you basically get the best performance at the cost of a few gigs of ram. Though it probably isn't gonna be that much better than just an ssd.

[–] LogicOverFeelings@piefed.ca 11 points 1 month ago

That's a totally valid use case, I have done it in the past and there are Linux distributions that are made to be used this way. Those distributions usually work by loading the whole system into ram which avoid multiples writes to the USB stick. They also usually offer some persistence mechanism so that data can be added on the USB stick.

Examples of distribution meant to be used this way: MX Linux, Puppy Linux

[–] un_ax@lemmy.today 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You also have the option of network booting. Generally the PC gets an initial boot image over the network, then mounts an ISCSI disk for the OS to fully boot from.

This causes disk access to be a bit slow, but is useful for a Pi when you're tried of the SD card dying and don't have a M2 hat.

  1. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Preboot_Execution_Environment
  2. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ISCSI/Boot
[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 month ago

Sic! I'll look into it! :D Thanks!

[–] How_do_I_computah@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

I mean that's how Unraid OS is designed to work

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 month ago

You can configure a lighter-weight setup (lxde, xfce, maybe mate, mint) so that it writes only if you do some writing. And also mount options to cache for a minute or so, for the smaller writes. But you better have some RAM then, for Firefox in memory/tmpfs. And compiling larger software will destroy your stick.

Also keep in mind, that thumbdrives are relatively cheap is, because it's flash memory is one step in quality before defetctive. Also no wear leveling.

[–] lepton64@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The thing is USB sticks are much more unstable than an nvme or something, so you're more likely to lose your data. They can also be stolen way easier than an nvme or hard drive, but if you encrypt it w/ a strong password that shouldn't be an issue.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 9 points 1 month ago

The concept here is that the USB carries the immutable OS image, you make as many copies of it as you need because it's a fixed image, boots the same every time, "your data" gets stored elsewhere.

[–] nibbler@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I did that in 2011, and I regrtetted ittt sooo bad. The machines wereeee designed for long uptimes, and between broken flash and lost USB it was just a huge pain.

For 2 years I operate some server now with some nvme connected via usb3 and it works pretty well. But even there one USB/nvme bridge died on me. I'd conclude, that this kind of hardware is not made for this kind of job.

[–] wltr@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

To tune the question slightly: what about USB SSD? I thought of doing the same thing for a different PC. (For HTPC.)

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 month ago

Wait a minute.... Would you know, I even happen to have an unused chassi 🤣

IulryHc8esmPOcq.jpg

[–] TrollAccount69@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No.

The person who said it’ll be too slow and you’ll ruin your usb is right but also:

Your system supports a nvme and sata. Dumping raw to nvme then working with it there so it doesn’t take so long to page into ram will be significantly faster.

Use spinning drives for storage though.

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I'm still looking for a place to put the spinning drive though 😅 this micro-ATX chassi, while really practical in many other aspects, doesn't leave much room for HDDs. 🫠 I could just leave one "standing" on the bottom of the chassi if I don't have to secure it with screws 🤣

[–] TrollAccount69@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You do have an asus prime case. The smallest is the 201.

Here is the manual showing where to mount three 3.5” drives:

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/2851351/Asus-Prime-Ap201.html?page=19#manual

You bolt them to the bottom.

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Holy crap that is/looks hilarious 🤣 And also thank you 🥰 now I won't have four SATA ports doing nothing. 💪

[–] TrollAccount69@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah!

So work on dumping and encoding your raws on the internal nvme SSD and then save the finished stuff and project folders you’re not using on the magnetic drives.

That’ll give you the fastest paging. That’s a ddr4 board right? The old wisdom used to be that you’d get faster performance with only two sticks of ram but that’s from back when two 32gb sticks was the same price as four 16gb sticks. Don’t shy away from using all four slots.

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 month ago

Thanks! Another two sticks of 8GB x 2 are on their way 🤣

PT7q5XIMcOiAOnw.png

Yes yes I have matched their latencies and speeds 😜

[–] TrollAccount69@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

What case? I can’t tell myself because you blurred out the info…

You may end up needing to use attached storage either in the form of a nas or some kind of usb bullshit.

E: asusprime ap201?

[–] nieceandtows@programming.dev 4 points 1 month ago

I remember a long time ago when I went to an onsite assignment and got a laptop. I didn't have my personal laptop so I just booted puppy Linux off a USB drive and used the office laptop as my personal device until I bought a personal laptop there. Fun times.

[–] RogueBanana@piefed.zip 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Was the original post deleted or overwritten with further updates?

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No, sorry, I think I just slapped "update" on this post too, while the one that's relevant is this one: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/linux@piefed.blahaj.zone/p/975714/just-a-little-update-effed-by-the-archaic-geforce-gt-220-somehow

[–] yetAnotherUser@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Can you remove that "update" part from this post, please? Having something in the post that mentions a different, unrelated problem you've had becomes a bit confusing.

[–] klankin@piefed.ca 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Just mount /home and /var to an SSD, tempFS(If you dont care about your data), or network drive and this is a perfect purpose for USB booting.

Saves your hard drives from all the bootloader stuff, and should be faster than a spinning disk if the drive is 3.0.

Id even mount the USB as read only to ensure it isnt damaged, and use any ISO generator to manage updates from another device (Like create a new flash, shutdown this PC, plug in the new flash - bam update complete)

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 2 points 1 month ago

/home and /var are the main targets for persistent storage. Unfortunately, a LOT of applications color outside those lines, so you're into a bit of case-by-case for what else needs to go into persistent storage, depending on what you run and how you configure it.

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 month ago

Thanks. God I love playing around with different solutions! 😁

[–] yuman@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago

you can load any live USB to RAM, if you got enough of it. use rd.live.ram (fedora) or toram (debian/ubuntu) and you can remove the USB afterwards and have a superfast "install"

[–] neclimdul@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

a number of years ago we got server that had a internal usb connection for the OS and an "enterprise" usb drive with redundant flash storage. so its an option and we tried it to get the extra exposure space since it was vendor supprted.

But also, the third time we went to replace the storage the vendor said they no longer supported that as an option... which they had never told us before. Even 10 year old servers they'd find parts for it.

so, maybe an enclosure with a traditional drive, but in wouldnt trust traditional usb or flash card usb storage for your os. just arent reliable enough for constant storage access.