Running Ubuntu off a External USB Drive on Windows 8 Laptop.

[sudodus]

Why do you think people want faster HDDs and SSDs?

Edit: And why should the same not count for the USB interface?

[monkeybrain20122]

I don't know 'faster' in what context, all I am saying is empirically I can't see any difference in speed or performance in the present context (running Linux in an external hd) due to usb interface.

[sudodus]

@monkeybrain20122, we have different experiences, and I think it is good to discuss it

My experience is that certain things, including booting (reading) and shutting off (flushing cached data) and copying files can be limited by the USB 2 transfer rate, which makes the system slow compared to running from internal drives, eSATA and USB 3 drives. A live system is reading its compressed file system into RAM, so it is quite responsive, while a persistent live system and an installed system are more depending on reading uncompressed data from the drive, which makes them slower when limited by slow flash memory but also by USB 2.

I certainly agree with you, that

with usb flash drives it is painfully slow

except with some of the really fast USB 3 pendrives, where the flash hardware is much faster than standard flash memory hardware.

And I agree with both of you, irv and monkeybrain20122, that running installed systems from USB works quite well. This is a good alternative to messing with dual booting in the internal drive and the potential risk to damage an installed Windows system. Installed systems in USB drives are also good as portable operating systems (if you use no proprietary driver).

[sudodus]

zemega reports problems when booting a PAE system from a USB drive in a computer with a non-pae CPU. The post was moved to an own thread

booting from external drive with non-pae CPU

[irv]

Just to mention that I don't use this installed OS on the external drive in any other computer. And maybe another reason it runs fast in the fact that I have a i7 processor and 8gig of RAM.
I have been thinking about getting an external SSD and installing Ubuntu on it. I would think with this and using it on USB3 would improve performance even more.

[sudodus]

I'm running this computer (that I'm typing from) from an SSD in eSATA right now. It is about the same speed as USB 3. It is not generally portable, because I have an nvidia proprietary driver, NVIDIA 304.88 for a GeForce GT 430 card. (But with the nouveau driver it is quite portable. I have tried.)

[monkeybrain20122]

I'm running this computer (that I'm typing from) from an SSD in eSATA right now. It is about the same speed as USB 3. It is not generally portable, because I have an nvidia proprietary driver, NVIDIA 304.88 for a GeForce GT 430 card. (But with the nouveau driver it is quite portable. I have tried.)

It would still work with nvidia proprietary driver, just have to rename xorg-config when you boot it off another machine that doesn't have a Nvidia card, in fact you may not even have to do that, I think the Nvidia driver will not load if it doesn't detect a Nvidia card (but I haven't tried it). Not sure about fglrx.

[sudodus]

I have another computer with an older nvidia chip. This driver does not work with that chip. Instead it wants the '173' proprietary driver.

[monkeybrain20122]

I have another computer with an older nvidia chip. This driver does not work with that chip. Instead it wants the '173' proprietary driver.

No, that wouldn't work. I only had one computer with Nvidia so I was booting off other computers with Intel or Amd.

[monkeybrain20122]

@monkeybrain20122, we have different experiences, and I think it is good to discuss it

My experience is that certain things, including booting (reading) and shutting off (flushing cached data) and copying files can be limited by the USB 2 transfer rate, which makes the system slow compared to running from internal drives, eSATA and USB 3 drives. A live system is reading its compressed file system into RAM, so it is quite responsive, while a persistent live system and an installed system are more depending on reading uncompressed data from the drive, which makes them slower when limited by slow flash memory but also by USB 2.

Depending on where you copy from/to. If from another drive then you are probably right. But in the same drive I see no difference. Booting up and shutting off may be a bit slower, but in general I find the difference is quite small.Once up and running there is no difference from my experience.