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
That's a totally valid use case, I have done it in the past and there are Linux distributions that are made to be used this way. Those distributions usually work by loading the whole system into ram which avoid multiples writes to the USB stick. They also usually offer some persistence mechanism so that data can be added on the USB stick.
Examples of distribution meant to be used this way: MX Linux, Puppy Linux
You also have the option of network booting. Generally the PC gets an initial boot image over the network, then mounts an ISCSI disk for the OS to fully boot from.
This causes disk access to be a bit slow, but is useful for a Pi when you're tried of the SD card dying and don't have a M2 hat.
I mean that's how Unraid OS is designed to work
The thing is USB sticks are much more unstable than an nvme or something, so you're more likely to lose your data. They can also be stolen way easier than an nvme or hard drive, but if you encrypt it w/ a strong password that shouldn't be an issue.
You can configure a lighter-weight setup (lxde, xfce, maybe mate, mint) so that it writes only if you do some writing. And also mount options to cache for a minute or so, for the smaller writes. But you better have some RAM then, for Firefox in memory/tmpfs. And compiling larger software will destroy your stick.
Also keep in mind, that thumbdrives are relatively cheap is, because it's flash memory is one step in quality before defetctive. Also no wear leveling.
To tune the question slightly: what about USB SSD? I thought of doing the same thing for a different PC. (For HTPC.)
No.
The person who said it’ll be too slow and you’ll ruin your usb is right but also:
Your system supports a nvme and sata. Dumping raw to nvme then working with it there so it doesn’t take so long to page into ram will be significantly faster.
Use spinning drives for storage though.
Was the original post deleted or overwritten with further updates?
I remember a long time ago when I went to an onsite assignment and got a laptop. I didn't have my personal laptop so I just booted puppy Linux off a USB drive and used the office laptop as my personal device until I bought a personal laptop there. Fun times.
I did that in 2011, and I regrtetted ittt sooo bad. The machines wereeee designed for long uptimes, and between broken flash and lost USB it was just a huge pain.
For 2 years I operate some server now with some nvme connected via usb3 and it works pretty well. But even there one USB/nvme bridge died on me. I'd conclude, that this kind of hardware is not made for this kind of job.
Just mount /home and /var to an SSD, tempFS(If you dont care about your data), or network drive and this is a perfect purpose for USB booting.
Saves your hard drives from all the bootloader stuff, and should be faster than a spinning disk if the drive is 3.0.
Id even mount the USB as read only to ensure it isnt damaged, and use any ISO generator to manage updates from another device (Like create a new flash, shutdown this PC, plug in the new flash - bam update complete)
a number of years ago we got server that had a internal usb connection for the OS and an "enterprise" usb drive with redundant flash storage. so its an option and we tried it to get the extra exposure space since it was vendor supprted.
But also, the third time we went to replace the storage the vendor said they no longer supported that as an option... which they had never told us before. Even 10 year old servers they'd find parts for it.
so, maybe an enclosure with a traditional drive, but in wouldnt trust traditional usb or flash card usb storage for your os. just arent reliable enough for constant storage access.
you can load any live USB to RAM, if you got enough of it. use rd.live.ram (fedora) or toram (debian/ubuntu) and you can remove the USB afterwards and have a superfast "install"
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