Running linux from an SD card...

[stwschool]

Is it worthwhile? Will I get a speed boost from doing so? (obviously storing my /home folder on the hard drive - the card reader is an internal unit so presumably not bound by USB2 speed limitations).

[philcamlin]

i would think it would be extremely slow

my sd card in my camera was so slow it took 10 sec to save a picture

now imagine loading ubuntu :(

[Whiffle]

You won't get any performance boost, SD cards are slower reading and writing than hard drives. Even the fastest SD Cards (Class 6), only read at 6 MB/s. Hard drives read at 50MB/s or better (usually better).

[tjalling]

Well, even as an internal unit it is probably connected using USB. You should check that first.

Regards,
Tjalling

[stwschool]

Crap. No worries. I just thought I'd check it out as an idea. Cheers guys :)

[MikeTheC]

Well, I've had the thought cross my mind to try it with my new MacBook Pro; however, I already have a nice enough system that I'm running Ubuntu on, so what benefit would there actually be to me?

[JohnFH]

For easy comparison of drive speeds, insert the SD card, find out the device name (/dev/sd ...), then use hdparm to test the speed of it:



hdparm -t /dev/sda


This will test the read speed. Note that the result is highly dependent on the quality of the card reader and the card itself.

I've installed Ubuntu on a 4Gb SDHC card in my eeepc, and it's slightly slower than a normal hard disk, but still very usable. The main advantages are not speed, but it uses much less power than normal HDDs and is completely silent.