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I'm borrowing someone's Windows machine, because my own box crashed and burned a while back -- back when Spotify was downloading and erasing a crapton of resources to its users' computers with every single use. Windows is incredibly irritating to me though, as I'm a programmer, and a lot of the areas I explore are locked down on Windows by default.

I'm looking into getting an external SSD drive, but I want one built to run an operating system on, not just store files. I know that all storage media has a read/write threshold before breaking down. What specifically should I be looking for to run Linux from a portable hard drive?

Also, I may eventually boot this drive from other computers. Are there any concerns over hardware drivers when going from machine to machine? I remember installing Ubuntu on my laptop one year, and though the live-CD allowed me to connect to Wifi, I had to install the drivers again for my wifi chip after install.

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  • You want a "Live CD/USB with persistence". It provides a writable partition. There is no difference between "one built to run an operation system on" and "one to store files". Everything is data, stored in files. Worry about hardware compatibility, can old BIOS boot from SSD, wifi support, ...
    – waltinator
    May 3, 2021 at 23:11
  • From what I'm reading, a live USB with persistence writes every change to a single "cow" file on the disk, which becomes corrupted easily. And not all storage is created equal. It's why you don't run an OS permanently from a USB. A standard hard drive has way more read/writes.
    – KI4JGT
    May 4, 2021 at 2:40
  • If this is your first External install I would recommend installing from an image file, it will boot on BIOS and on UEFI computers. askubuntu.com/questions/1300454/…. I have had Full install flash drives last for more that five years. A SSD should easily last ten. May 4, 2021 at 4:59

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Some thoughts on running an SSD in an external enclosure:

  1. Select an external hardware enclosure that allows TRIM to be run. Assume TRIM cannot be run on a random USB box. I found a box that does eSATA as well as USB3 works well, attaching via eSATA to run trim.
  2. Be aware of launchpad bug 1396379. You may install to the external drive, but a)The drive wont boot on another machine and b)your main machine wont boot without the attached external drive. Do add yourself to the "Does this affect me" list on the bug.
  3. Avoid installing any proprietary drivers if the open source ones included in your distribution work. They should work on another machine too.
  4. Maximum portability would be through a live-media, but adding persistence brings in the possibility of installing proprietary drivers. Instead of a casper-rw for (all incl system) storage, consider a home-rw partition/file for storage of your files. That should maintain the maximum portability and still allow you to store your files.
  5. Careful with encrypting things. A 1.5GB Veracrypt file on an SSD became unreadable after about 9 months. The SSD has had no other problems for years of later use.

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