Arch Linux

duke11235

Member

Registered: 2009-10-09

Posts: 221

USB Stick Lag Issues

I've installed Arch on a 32GB USB Stick that I can then take around to use on computers throughout the University. While for the most part it works great, sometimes it slows down to a standstill, then eventually gets better. I'm guessing it's congestion on the USB connection, as running sync will cause the system to hang, and it seems to be worse on older USB2 only computers. Does anyone have any recommendations on how to mitigate this issue?

nomorewindows

Member

Registered: 2010-04-03

Posts: 3,368

Re: USB Stick Lag Issues

The USB stick will eventually wear out over time quicker than the permanent hard drive.  Now if you had a machine that you could PXE boot from that would be better.  You would have to use a proxy dhcp server in order to do that in the middle of an already functional network.

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Look ma, no mouse.

R00KIE

Forum Fellow

From: Between a computer and a chair

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 4,734

Re: USB Stick Lag Issues

I'd say try using f2fs or btrfs, at least for me they seems to be a bit more snappy than ext4 on a usb3 flash drive(1). Make sure you do regular backups though, I was using f2fs until recently when after a full update the system just stopped working and I couldn't really figure out why, I have since been giving btrfs a go.
Be aware that even though sequential read/write speeds may be good, usb flash drives usually suck at random writes.

(1) It is a relatively fast usb3 flash drive, in the only pc with usb3 I have I've seen it do around 70MB/s sequential write (with dd) and around 100MB/s read (with hdparm). I suspect the read speed is limited by something in the system and not the true limit of the usb flash drive. I usually use it on usb2 only machines though and it's perfectly usable.

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R00KIE
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