I am not quite ready to switch to a GNU/Linux yet, but I have live booted Linux Mint Xfce yesterday, with most things working, but much worse for launching times, etc. Would it be any different if I installed it on my eMMC drive? Since they are both based on NAND flash memory, I am clueless about it.
Probably depends on the speed of your usb pen and port. If you know for a fact that everything USB side is 3.1, USB will be faster. Otherwise eMMC will be faster. If everything is USB3.1 gen 2, USB looks to be around 3x as fast. Gen 1 is about 25% faster.
What I found in a quick search:
- eMMC: 400MB/s
- USB 3.1 gen 1: 500MB/s
- USB 3.1 gen 2: 1250MB/s
If any part of the USB chain is 2 or lower, it’s slower.
Installed will be faster.
But you should note that emmc systems are not intended for heavy use. They have a much shorter wearout lifespan than SSDs. If you or your OS do a lot of writing to disk, you might end up with a failure.
Just be aware of that possibility, and have backups.
I know that, during my own move from Windows to Linux, I found that the USB drive tended to lag under heavy read/write operations. I did not experienced that with Linux directly loaded on a SATA SSD. I also had some issues dealing with my storage drive (NVMe SSD) still using an NTFS file system. Once I went full Linux and ext4, it’s been nothing but smooth sailing.
As @MagicShel@lemmy.zip pointed out, performance will depend heavily on the generation of USB device and port. I was using a USB 3.1 device and a USB 3.1 port (no idea on the generation). So, speeds were ok-ish. By comparison, SATA 2 can have a transfer rate of 2 GB/s. And while the SSD itself may not have saturated that bandwidth, it almost certainly blew the transfer rate of my USB device out of the water. When I later upgraded to an NVMe drive, things just got better.
Overall, load times from the USB drive is the one place I wouldn’t trust testing Linux on USB. It’s going to be slower and have lag compared to an SSD. Read/Write performance should be comparable to Windows. Though, taking the precaution of either dual booting or backing up your Windows install can certainly make sense to test things out.
For me, even if it wasn’t better, I’d be willing to sacrifice launching times, in order to get rid of windows
You could install a hot mount SATA drive slot too if your using a workstation. I actually have 3.
