Running Linux OS off of USB 2.0 thumb drive vs USB 2.0 External HDD

[ehanger]

I need another computer and have enough spare parts to build one, except for the hard drive. I was thinking of either installing my OS to a thumb drive, or to an external mechanical drive. Both are using USB 2.0 interface.

Would running a Linux distro like Ubuntu off this setup be viable? Obviously it won't be fast but will it at least be usable? The system will have an Ivy Bridge i5 and 8GB of memory.

 

[Calculagator]

You can always try it.
Unless your flash drive is very fast, the external disk will be much better. Flash drives have very slow write speeds-especially if they have been used.
I've never done it with ubuntu, but I know it is possible to load an entire OS into RAM at every boot. If you use a small enough distro, you could get very fast performance.

 

[httpinternet]

Linux from USB is very usable. Memory elements which saves 1 bit in flash drives will die after certain amount of times you write 0 or 1 to them, but in normal usage that is probably period of couple of years. Don't format the flash drive because they are deliberately fragmented to spread the usage of memory blocks even on whole drive (they will actually perform faster non defragmented). Also use linux specific partition because they don't have defragmentation (forgot the name). Another issue you might face is that you cannot install linux on USB drive. You can boot from it and use it, but not install on the same drive. You can use persistance mode (available on most distributions) to save the changes you make to your linux.

I think USB will be faster than HDD because USB flash memory doesn't has instant access to any memory block, and HDD is slow because of the head movement. HDD is faster in transfering speed, but not in access time