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since quite some time i'm running ubuntu on an external hard disk, connected to the PC via USB. This works quite well. I recently got a 32GB USB stick and i installed (so no live USB) Ubuntu 11.10 on it. I found this more practical because smaller than a hard disk. BUT the OS it is running a lot slower than with the HD. I checked transfer rates and compared with the HD and it looks as if the USB is quicker than the HD. Any idea why? I partitioned the USB stick like this: first a swap area of about 2GB, then the ext4 root partion and last an NTFS partition.

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I used to have two 4Gb USB sticks from different manufactures. Plugged into a USB 2 port, both were nice and fast. Plugged into a USB 1 port, one of them was a little slow, and one was HORRIBLY slow. I think one was falling back to "high speed" (12mbps) and the other was falling back to "low speed" (1.5mbps). – Paul Tomblin Jan 12 '12 at 20:49
if your 4Gb USB was USB 2.0 then it wasnt "falling back" to USB 2.0 but using it and "falling back" only to USB 1.0. "Falling back" means running at falled back speed. – Kangarooo Dec 23 '12 at 3:23

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USB Flash drives performance is inferior to traditional hard drives. It's just a different technology and not as fast. The illustrious Jeff Atwood has an article explaining this in detail on his Coding Horror site, where he goes into more detail. Lots more detail.

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