Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I was debating on getting some new USB 3.x drives for testing. I read a lot of reviews and per-chance came upon the new portable ssd drives.

Has anyone had a chance to test these out? They have great reviews for around 25 bucks for 250 gb.

I have one. (250GB)
Uses a short USB cable to plug into computer port.
Power is provided by the USB port.

Basically works like a normal SSD.
speed of operation is best when plugged into USB 3 port.
The speed ability, written on the box it comes in, is very best overall conditions.
In general, you can expect speed results of 60% to 70% of what manufacture says.
Some speed is affected by what the data is, location it is coming from, and read speed of that location.
I see the manufactures stated speeds , when reading from memory locations and writing to the USB SSD.

It does work plugged into any type USB port (v 1, 2, or 3).
Any normal data/power USB port.

Have not tried it plugged into a USB hub.
Power demand, could be an issue on one of those, with a bunch of other things plugged into the hub.

I was thinking that as long as the bios can see it, it would run great as a bootable device. You could carry your computer in your pocket and use it on most any hardware available.

Might have to make the investment of 10 cents per gig, just to check it out.

Yes, you can install a Puppy version on it the same way as installing to a USB.

To the computer it is just a USB drive like any other USB drive.

I do suggest to make the Puppy install a frugal install.
Set it up like a internal drive install.
A Puppy frugal install with a boot loader to boot it.
Allows multiple different Puppy versions frugal installs.
Keeps data storage out of the frugal install, except what is in the frugal install save file/folder.
All the Puppy files in the frugal install folder(directory).
Any data stored on drive in main or other partitions, directories, etc....

A warning to anyone reading this thread, be careful, there are lots of fake "SSDs" out there:

https://bkhome.org/news/202110/claimed- ... 128gb.html

The lesson is, stay away from no-brand SSDs on Aliexpress and eBay!

One thing I did a little while ago, is bought a Samsung NVME SSD and a USB3 adaptor enclosure for it. Before that, have bought SATA SSDs and USB3 adaptors. Buying the two items separately is an alternative strategy, so you know exactly what SSD you have, as opposed to just buying a USB3-SSD.

I posted a photo:

https://bkhome.org/news/202201/observed ... -ssds.html

I found that the NVME SSD ran rather hot, so I took the cover off the adaptor, much better. It wasn't conducting the heat off very well.

@BarryK :-

BarryK wrote: ↑Mon Apr 18, 2022 12:08 am

A warning to anyone reading this thread, be careful, there are lots of fake "SSDs" out there:

https://bkhome.org/news/202110/claimed- ... 128gb.html

The lesson is, stay away from no-brand SSDs on Aliexpress and eBay!

One thing I did a little while ago, is bought a Samsung NVME SSD and a USB3 adaptor enclosure for it. Before that, have bought SATA SSDs and USB3 adaptors. Buying the two items separately is an alternative strategy, so you know exactly what SSD you have, as opposed to just buying a USB3-SSD.

I posted a photo:

https://bkhome.org/news/202201/observed ... -ssds.html

I found that the NVME SSD ran rather hot, so I took the cover off the adaptor, much better. It wasn't conducting the heat off very well.

Let's modify your suggestion a wee bit, Barry. Let's make that "Stay away from Aliexpress.....period!"

(I've never yet heard anybody with a good word to say about that site....)

With regard to the heat issue, reports for the near future are that the PCI-e 5.0 NVME drives - when they appear on the market - will actually come with heatsinks fitted.....by default, OOTB. Because the 'blazing' data transfer speeds will, by necessity, also lead to 'blazing' drive temperatures. You're far from the first to have discovered this issue with NVME drives.

.....I reckon this is an example where it is better to stay with an older technology.

I treated myself to a 1 TB Crucial MX500 late last year. It's the older single-level cell type - so 'older technology' - but that's one of the reasons these are, apparently, popular with enterprise users. Because the lower 'density' makes them way more reliable, it seems. With a quoted average daily use of several hundred MB of read/write operations every day, you can expect a life span of well over 10-12 years out of it.

And 300 MB/s 'write' & 500 MB/s + for 'read' speeds is more than fast enough for me.

Mike.

@peppyy :-

peppyy wrote: ↑Sun Apr 17, 2022 4:39 pm

I was thinking that as long as the bios can see it, it would run great as a bootable device. You could carry your computer in your pocket and use it on most any hardware available.

Might have to make the investment of 10 cents per gig, just to check it out.

What I tend to do with external USB drives is to set-up a 'frugal' Puppy install, and install Grub4DOS TO that drive (you'll need this anyway, for booting the drive independently). I then also set-up an additional boot entry in my 'main' Grub4DOS boot Menu which will 'chain-link' to the external drive's boot-loader.

This gives you alternative ways to boot it. And most 'puters also have the ability for a 'one-time' boot Menu, usually accessed via one of the function keys (on this HP rig, repeatedly pressing the 'Esc' button at boot will bring it up).

Mike.

I had VirtualBox running under a 1TB HDD in Bionicpup64. It had a small (1GB) FAT32boot sector and the rest of the drive
was a ext4 partition with all the Puppy frugal files, ISOs, VMs etc. But I wanted more portability via a SSD.

So I bought a NMVe 500GB SSD but accidentally bought a NAND USB metal drive box. SSD not recognized. But the drive box was so cheap, sigh !! So then I had to go and buy a USB C NMVe drive box at twice the price but which now works very well.

To transfer the files over to the SSD I shrunk the large ext4 partition on the HDD enough so that it would fit on the smaller SSD. I used GParted as a live ISO on a small USB rater than Gparted running on a Puppy Linux OS, which seems to be the only way to do it.

I then used GParted to make a msdos partition table on the empty SSD .

I then literally copied and pasted the Fat32 partition from the HDD to the SDD. Ditto for the ext4 partition.
I then set the boot flags of the FAT32 partition on the SSD to boot and lba as per the original HDD. It was a very quick process, given the drive sizes.

I now have a truly fast, portable platform to run all kinds of OS in VirtualBox. So the moral is, ensure you match the SSD and drive box and you can easily run Puppy on a SSD.

@mikewalsh
I use the one time boot menu a lot for "Trying" other systems. Mine is the F2 key and it boots to the GUI bios. I have one usb drive with several ISO files, Most of which I boot to ram.
I am guessing the usb3.0 is the biggest limiting factor on my computer. It does have an external sata 6gb/sec port on it though. Might be really nice for an external drive?

@Geek3579
When I switched to my new internal SSD, I booted Puppy Live and used gparted to copy, (clone) the partitions from one drive to another, then set the boot order to the new drive. It worked flawlessly.