Going to attempt run Kubu from 8 gig usb drive

[SteveRiley]

That was true with early-generation SSDs, but modern gear doesn't exhibit write-cycle exhaustion characteristics. Tom's Hardware investigated a variety of claims about SSDs. It's a somewhat lengthy article, and well worth the time to read. Firmware improvements and wear-leveling have matured enough that SSDs now appear to have about the same reliability as rotating media. But we don't have enough data yet to believe vendor claims that SSDs are more reliable. And since I back up everything twice anyway (*), a dead drive is not a catastrophe for me.

(*) nightly to my Windows Home Server, which in turn backs up to the cloud.

[vw72]

Simply that I'm now so spoiled by having used only SSDs on all my computers for the last couple years that even USB drives now seem intolerably slow to me.

USB drives are intolerably slow whether you are used to SSDs or not!

[woodsmoke]

Well, I must demur somewhat.

I find running the Linux Mint KDE on the usb stick to be probably almost the same as a hd.

But, I'm also running 2 gig of memory and an 8600 nvidia card.

Next I'll try Kubu, only it will not be Precise which installed but would not work.

woodsmoke

[vw72]

Maximum USB 2.0 read speed is around 30mbs. That would be comparable to decent, but older IDE drive. A SATA drive read speed can be as high as 300mbs and an SSD even faster. However, those are all theoretical maximums and actual experience is often only about 25% of the maximum (7mbs for USB and 75mbs for SATA II). USB writes are about 1/2 of the read speed.

Once apps are loaded, however, performance should be the same, on a given machine, regardless of whether the system loaded from USB or an internal drive. At that point, it's all in RAM.