is freebsd suited for USB-drive?

I'm running Freebsd 14.3 as my daily drive on an external USB drive and it works flawlessly. But you might still have better performance on a computer's drive. is this what you wanted to know ?
 
I have 15-CURRENT installed to a USB stick just to see if one of my laptops can run FreeBSD at all. There's still a few things to verify, but other than that, the laptop seems ready for 15-RELEASE when it comes out in December.

As for the actual experience - Well, I'm compiling stuff from ports, and compiling is slow when stuff is installed to a USB stick rather than the internal SSD.

As an OS, FreeBSD is very much usable if running off a USB stick - but I would not daily-drive the stuff I have installed.
 
FreeBSD can run from a USB drive, but stability depends on the build. NomadBSD (current version 141R-20240711) is indeed a good option, though sometimes it may halt. It’s a bit like hunting for dice dreams free rolls—works great when it runs smoothly, but can be hit-or-miss at time
 
cracauer@ said:
There's no reason to use crappy USB sticks.
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For single time give aways, but else you are right.

I always have an USB flash drive ready to hand with FreeBSD on it: for emergency cases, testing purposes,...or maybe I meet some one who suddenly wants to take a peek at FreeBSD. 😂
I don't see no reason why FreeBSD shall not be used on an USB device - as long your machine boots from it. (there are flash drives not every machine can boot from for whatever reasons - search me.)

But besides the performance loss, others already mentioned, if you don't get a really fast device (don't blindly believe product's specs! especially with USB flash drives you really need to look very close) I wouldn't use any unix[like] OS on an USB drive for my daily driver, at least if it's not some high quality thing like cracauer@ mentioned: some USB flash drive enclosure, but a real SSD/NVME inside.
Point is:
Any unix[like] OS does a lot of writing due work (/var/) "Normal" flash drives don't provide by far that amount of read-write cycles as real SSDs do - especially the cheap ones can be worn out very quickly - and suddenly.
When using it for more than just to take a quick peek you will get something on it that bugs you when the drive suddenly dies. :cool:
 
cracauer@ said:
Get a USB-to-NVMe enclosure and a couple of 16 GB Intel Optane drives ($4-5 each).
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I have two different ones. Both use 2280 M.2 NVMe drives. I use one for burning images to eMMC drives. Both use case I have 512GB drives.
I thought about getting a 2242 NVMe/USB adapter. But too wide.

My problem with these is they are too wide. They need a leash to use in most computers. USB ports are stacked so tight these days.
I still use mostly USB Stick for my USB-Live. Slow but only used for emergencies or burning an image..
 
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