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Hello I just installed Ubuntu 14.04 in my HP 2.0 pen drive. **(Installed not Live USB).Eventhough I have 4 GB RAM and 2 GB Nvidia Graphics card and i5 processor, it is lagging so much. One click on an icon and it freezes for a minute before it resumes. I've read articles that read and write will be slower in flash memory.

Is this bottleneck due to USB or the pendrive? If it is a pen drive I can take another internal harddisk and connect it as an external disk. Will this make the ubuntu booting and running faster and act as normal desktop OS? Or the whole USB thing is slower in general compared to internal harddisks?

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  • How did you install the os onto the pen drive? Usb 2.0 should give you an average read/write speed of up to 40MBs a second where as an average hard drive is capable of up to 80-100MB throughput. So speed could be a factor. Also how big is the pen drive?
    – ILOVEKODI
    Jun 2, 2016 at 16:00
  • 16 gb pen drive
    – AshTyson
    Jun 2, 2016 at 16:03
  • I have a full install in 16GB flash drive an found it acceptable, but a lot slower than hard drive which is slower than SSD. I also found a USB3 flash drive even in a USB2 port to be about 10% faster. But brand of flash drive can make a huge difference also. pendrive speed tests USB2 & USB3 ubuntuforums.org/… Also you want to reduce writes by changing the fstab so that everything gets mounted with noatime. Also since partition is small, not a lot of advantage to journal. If ext4, turn journal off. sudo tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sdb1
    – oldfred
    Jun 2, 2016 at 16:39

2 Answers 2

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I think in your case the bottleneck seems to be the USB 2 480 Mbit/s max conetcetion, that make it feel painfull slow.

So another internal drive conectect via USB2 won't help, you need to either install it intenaly, (but I assume, windws lays there already or us USB 3 speed hardware.

Feel free to ask futher if there are questions open.

edit: and Welcome to Stack Exchange.

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  • So I'm better of at using dual boot? If so can you point me to a guide which gives proper installation setup with windows 7? I had dual boot but there is always problem mounting drives if windows is not shut down properly, in which most of the time it is.
    – AshTyson
    Jun 2, 2016 at 16:11
  • @Sammy: Here's a guide to dual-boot. It's pretty non-technical for the most part. Hope it will help you good. Hard-disks with SATA II or SATA III connectors are way way faster than USB 2.0 or USB 2.1.
    – ipse lute
    Jun 2, 2016 at 16:29
  • Can u put the link as a comment or as an edit?
    – AshTyson
    Jun 2, 2016 at 17:28
  • So, I am right, or why didn't you use the internal drive? I add some instructions on Dual boot to the answer if you wish.
    – Kupferdrache
    Jun 2, 2016 at 17:49
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The simple answer is that you are running an OS on the USB bus, and that is the slowest bus on your system. (FYI when I say bus, I am not making an analogy to a people bus)

Your computer is designed to give a faster bus to the hard drive system, the USB bus is for peripherals, so it has less priority. Unless the machine was designed to run from USB, then this is a hardware issue, and there is no fix as far as I know via software. I don't want to even start talking about USB1 vs USB2 vs USB3, these are all architectures not USB ports.

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