Arch Linux

RogueKing_

Member

Registered: 2019-01-15

Posts: 1

[Solved] Can & Should I Store Programs On A USB Drive

My goal is to install and store programs on a USB to save space on my 25GB hard drive.
All the topics I could find about this, talked about persistent OSs on a USB.
I can't seem to find any information on my issue.

~Thanks

Last edited by RogueKing_ (2019-02-05 06:51:38)

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 77,796

Re: [Solved] Can & Should I Store Programs On A USB Drive

That's rather not going to work (in general) because the programs may want to access paths like /usr/share/foo/bar.data which are at best encoded at compilation time and usually make up for the lion share of any programs disk usage.
You can use an overlay fs https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Overlay_filesystem or mount the usb drive to /usr or rather the root fs and mount your /home partition from the disk.

If you compile stuff yourself, you can of course alter the PKGBUILD to compile for and install to eg. /usr/local or /opt and mount the usb key to those dirs.

Notice that this is anything but a good idea: USB keys are not only usually considerably slower than SDDs, but also not managed, ie. the cells will die off really fast on constant rewrites of specific sectors (if you run "for ((i=0;i<10000000;++i)) echo > ~/foo; done" on an SDD, it's almost never going to write into the same cell, but a USB key will and that cell will die pretty fast)
Since you're "encouraged" to update fairly often w/ a rolling release distro, I'd rather put your por… cat videos onto the USB key.

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