Installing ubuntu on pendrive.

[ajinthomas]

I'm an android developer, eclipse is very slow in my Ubuntu, booting time is also very high.

So I decided to buy a USB 3.0 Pendrive and install my Ubuntu, eclipse, and android SDK in it. A friend of mine suggested that it is not recommended to install Ubuntu on a Pendrive since it will reduce the life of the pendrive and I must ask about it in the forum. Please let me know what you think.

Also suggest me whether I should use a 32GB pendrive or is 16GB enough.

Thanks in advance.

[furything]

A friend of mine is an electronics engineer designing stuff for PCs.

He has said to me that the flash memory only has so many writes so as a backup device all ok. Just for back up/transferring files between PCs I probably get through 1 pen drive every 2 years (this is a work one - my personal ones tend to last a bit longer).

Windows os very bad at disk management and the drive gets written to a lot.

Linux is far more conservative so if you fix at a certain install and don't keep up to date (distribution updates/upgrades) you will probably be ok. Suggest 32gb as i don't know how much space you are going to use dev'ing.

From a number of people I know that jumped on to ssd hard drives have already had them fail (again windows os) and just outside the warranty

[C.S.Cameron]

A pendrive should be good for several years use, running Ubuntu.
Between 10000 and 1000000 writes, and that takes a while.
Check the warranty.
I have been running Linux from an USB2 drive for over 5 years.