Fastest USB stick

B

balanga

I have a Mini-PC which has Windows 10 installed in eMMC storage and would eventually like to replace that with FreeBSD. But before I do I want to run FreeBSD on the system by booting from a USB stick to see how usable the system is under FreeBSD.

With that in mind can anyone suggest which is the fastest available USB stick? What sort of performance figures should I be looking at?

How does this sound?

Or should I look at using an external SSD disk in a USB caddy?
 
balanga said:
to see how usable the system is under FreeBSD.
Click to expand...

Do you mean "how well the Mini-PC's hardware is supported?" Otherwise, if you're thinking you can profile the machine's performance from a USB drive, I don't think that's feasible. Disk I/O over USB (or eSATA) won't be equal in performance to SATA, even with USB 3.1.
 
You have to realize that pretty much all USB-flash memory devices (non SSD-named ones at least) are kinda slow when it comes to random writes (and 4K) so it's more than likely is going to be slower than your eMMC and if you're going to use one to replace a HDD be prepared for slow I/O access. Keep in mind that not all USB initialize fast enough for the BIOS to detect which may lead to some non predictable behavior. Anyhow, if you're going for a decent and relatively fast USB stick the Sandisk Extreme USB or Extreme PRO USB (these look pretty much the same) have a good track record in my book. Transcend and PQI have good ones too much they're usually slower than what Sandisk offers at the same price range. I've used Sandisk Extreme USB sticks to drive MIPS devices in the past and it works well although random write kinda kills the overall performance...
 
I realise that a USB device is going to be slower than eMMC, but I'm looking for something that it usable in performance terms, until I overwrite my eMMC Windows partition.

How would I measure performance of various USB devices so that I can make a comparison?

At the moment I'm thinking of using a USB attached SSD drive instead of a USB flash drive but I'd like to see comparative figures.
 
If you're going with a stick, I'd second the recommendation for SanDisk above. I used an Extreme Pro USB 3.0 stick (128 GB) for about a year daily at work to keep my main development virtual machine. The host ran Windows, with VirtualBox configured to access the raw device, which it then presented as a (virtual) disk to the guest. Performance was good (for compiling and testing etc., I basically lived in the machine apart from some browsing and office document editing). Possibly some VB caching could still have been in effect, so YMMV, but in general these should be fast enough to at least evaluate your device. Of course, the Mini-PCs USB system also needs to be fast enough.
 
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