
- Use usb storage for mac install#
- Use usb storage for mac update#
- Use usb storage for mac full#
You may never be able to fully overwrite a Flash memory USB, so if you'll be storing extremely sensitive data then use encryption.
Use usb storage for mac install#
Making a good backup of your data and OS-X is a pre-requisite, or at least have an install disk & code (or whatever OS-X uses) ready for a clean re-install.
Use usb storage for mac full#
I think it depends on the particular drive, some should work, but some won't (too slow, corrupts files, mystery problems.).Ī cheap brand of orange USB's (that rhyme with "Flexar") would be 100% reliable as a live USB for months, but trying a full install would slow to a crawl then crash with permanent filesystem errors. If you're talking about doing a full install directly to a USB drive, that may or may not work.
In practice it could take years to wear out a USB, and they're very cheap & easy to replace Even an old small 4GB USB is big enough for most live distros. The limited write lifetime of the USB's flash memory might be a concern, using the noatime mount option should avoid some generally useless writes updating inode access times (ex. Now you'll have to avoid breaking your system, but even if you did a catastrophic failure, all the changes are kept in the persistent file/partition, and you can boot without persistence & erase the persistent data to start over.
If you used persistence on your live USB, it would feel & act like a regular fully installed system, with changes saved to the persistent file/partition.
toram can also let you use a USB drive to boot live in ram, then install to / format / overwrite / remove that same USB drive. However, the seek times of a USB are near 1-5ms, so it may "feel" faster sometimes compared to a spinning hard drive (seek times +70ms?).Īnd the toram boot option could help the speed A LOT if you can spare the 1 or 2GB of ram then all files are read at your RAM's speed (1GB/s to 10GB/s?) much much faster than a hard drive and almost all SSD's - the whole system could feel lightning fast (you'll really notice if you have a slow internet connection then -) (USB writing speed is generally slower than reading). USB read speeds could be from 10MB/s to 30MB/s for relatively cheap USBs, or 50-300MB/s for USB2 or USB3 devices which may be comparable to a hard drive. Upgrading to a new release means just downloading a new ISO & making a new live USB.Ī big limitation might be the read speed of your USB drive. (There should be some tools to create a live ISO from a running live system, other distros like MX-Linux have virtually 1-click tools included). deb files "to ram" after booting, but creating a new live USB / ISO would make the changes permanent. Use usb storage for mac update#
You can even update a few packages by installing some. Just remember to store any files you want to keep on a real partition (like a 2nd or 3rd partition of the USB) or online. This can be great for experimenting with a new OS, it's hard to permanently "break" it.
visiting the wrong website & getting malicious tracking cookies/software or messing with your web browser. giving root access to "some helpful pal online" who breaks everything or installs questionable programs. Any accidental errors like this are also lost with a reboot:. New software sources/PPAs can be tried & packages installed (provided you have the RAM), but are lost with a reboot.
All new files & changes are in RAM, but are lost with a reboot. You can use a live USB as your main OS, as long as you have enough RAM (+4GB seems very usable, even 2GB should work).