Hello! The TL;DR is:
I have an m.2 drive that is in a sturdy enclosure that has 1 TB. I have Ventoy with Medicat on there, with some backups of important data.
I still have a lot of room left on there, so I was thinking what else I could do, and the idea of basically installing a Linux Distro to a chunk of free space on there. Maybe Debian/Fedora or Arch.
Is there anything I should be aware of to help not break that system or rapidly kill the drive? It’s not a USB flash drive, it’s a M.2 drive that’s put on a small board that then allows it to talk via USB C/Thunderbolt.
EDIT: Just to be sure, if I use Ventoy’s EFI, do I need to be worried about a conflict with the bootloader of the Linux install?
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Definitely look for portable SSDs rather than flash drives. Different technology, usually significantly larger (physically). Easily saturates a USB 2.0 connection, so look for USB 3.0.
Back when Microsoft supported Windows To Go, they had a short list of verified drives to use. Surely outdated now but might be a good starting point.
FWIW I used to run Windows 10 off a Samsung T5. It worked fine, except that it would always shut down when I tried to suspend. Still works as far as I know, I just haven’t used it in a long time.
USB 3.0 (5 Gbps) is quite ancient by today’s standards. I’d recommend a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) or even a USB 4.0 drive (20/40 Gbps) drive.
Good point. I can never keep my USB 3 naming schemes straight.
The faster nvme-based sticks can even exceed 3.0’s 5gbps!