I am just about to set up my new Linux machine, which will be used to convert analog video and audio to digital video and audio. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t run the system off of a live USB stick (say, a good quality one from Sandisk), that is, without installing Linux on the hard drive and not setting up a boot partition, a system partition, and all that?
Mainly performance will take a hit. USB drives are also not really rated for consistent writes so you’ll find a USB dies quicker than a standard drive
Running from USB usually means it boots from USB and then is stored on your RAM. If you don’t write to the drive at all, the USB will usually be fine.
I have XigmaNAS (FreeBSD) setup like that. Works fine if the OS is really small.
XigmaNAS user here… Only downside to that is that you will only find out the USB drive is bad when rebooting (happened to me once). But keeping good backups for the configuration makes recovering a 5 min thing.
I see. Well, scratch that then. 😅 Thanks! 🥰
I guess an SD card might be better. RasPis work from those for years just fine. Just don’t kill the power, power down nicely. SD cards are fragile on that
Interesting! Never thought of that, even though I am running three RPis 😅 I do have a micro SD card and a micro SD card to USB adapter… 🤔
Don’t if you value your data. Those are not intended for such tasks and will fail much sooner than your usual disk. Edit: read is fine, write is not
You could buy an M.2 to USB enclosure and use a proper SSD NVMe as “USB drive” but I don’t really see any gain in it.
The gain is portability. I do this between repairing family machines. You can take your OS and near m.2 mobo speeds and get to work. Live USBs are needed sometimes but having what’s yours when you need it exactly where you need it is what matters in times of getting shit done.
Hear hear. It’s just my laziness 🤣
If /home and /var are on disk and not USB then it might be ok. The rest of the os is typically only written when installing or configuring things.
Try it, might be fun.
In such a scenario, do I create mount points for them or is there some other, preferred way of pointing to them? Symlinks?
Mount points in fstab
Roger🫡
Also the smaller OS’s (puppy linux, tailOS) that can run entirely in RAM are going to be fast when it comes to anything but disk reads.
It’s just “OSes”, and it doesn’t need to waste an apostrophe. They’re going extinct, you know.
I also thought about running from RAM but I guess the transcription might be needing the RAM too. So that route probably depends on how much RAM there is available
It’s not a deal-breaker or anything tho. Just not for something long term. Totally feasible as something quick and dirty tho.