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Based on a comment, I'm trying to make this a technical question rather than an opinion question--performance of two proposed hardware configurations.

I want to switch back and forth between Linux and Windows on my laptop. I'm doing some performance heavy processing that requires large files.

I benchmarked my 5400 RPM laptop HDD as such:

enter image description here

USB 3.0 flash drives claim to get many times that. I understand that there are various modes of read/write/seek and speeds vary depending on file size as well. Given the properties of the different storage devices, would there be any performance advantage to me running a VirtulBox VM from a flash drive VS my HDD?

Also, if I wanted to go dual boot, which would perform better, partition on my HDD or boot from USB?

abalter
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1 Answers1

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Short answer:

Yes, a USB3 flash drive attached to a USB3 port would most certainly be faster than a 5400RPM hard drive. I've run Windows-To-Go from a flash drive before, and the performance is on-par with being booted from the internal SSD.

HOWEVER...

You will also burn up that flash drive very quickly. Virtual machines are very I/O intensive. USB flash drives are not designed to handle that kind of load on a long-term basis the way SSDs are.

Wes Sayeed
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