I’ve been using some cheap flash drives for things like installing OSs and the like, but now I’ve picked up a Dell Wyse 3040 system to play with which only has 8gb of storage. So I’m installing the OS onto a flash drive permanently (don’t worry, just for messing with, nothing of value will be lost if/when the drive craps out).
However, the performance of my cheap flash drive is terrible and installing packages & transferring files is so slow. My question is: Would getting a better drive make a meaningful difference here? If so, anyone have some recommendations of drives they like that are fast?
You could go with a 2.5in SSD in a USB enclosure. I think OP was just suggesting this as the highest performance option.
You won’t see much of a difference between SATA and NVMe (if at all) as the maximum speed for SATA (6Gbps) is higher than the maximum speed for USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 Gen1 (5Gbps).
Not disagreeing, because you’re right that the differences you’d see are minimal, but did want to add that latency & random I/o is better on most nvme than most SATA SSD. And that would be somewhat beneficial for an OS drive in my opinion. But the difference would probably not be noticeable, as you said.