Re: Speed of USB drives?

On 14 Feb 2007 11:47:38 -0800, stocksami@xxxxxxxxxxxxx staggered into
the Black Sun and said:
I want to install [Linux] on my desktop PC, but I don't have time to
install a 2nd [disk]

? Jumper drive appropriately (if drive is IDE). Open case, put new
drive into free 3.5" bay, attach drive to bay with screws. Plug in IDE
or SATA cable, plug in power cable. Close case. ~10 minutes if your
case was designed well. Could take longer if you have an HPCompaq.

I was thinking of getting a 20 or 30 GB portable usb drive and
installing linux there. Does anyone know how fast it would be?

USB2 is ~20M/s. SATA and IDE are 30-40M/s. Since USB2 drives are more
expensive and slower than SATA/IDE drives, the only real reason to use
them is if you need to use them on more than one machine. Or if your
machine's 3.5" drive bays are full.

Another alternative would be to stick with a flash memory type USB
drive and install a more limited size linux distro. Would that be
significantly faster?

Not unless you had a bunch of RAM and you loaded the whole thing into
RAM using something like the "toram" option in many LiveCDs.

--
The night passed like a kidney stone: painfully and with the help of
major sedatives. --T. Delgado, Lyttle Lytton winner, 2001
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
.

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