Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

mikeschn · Joined: 27 Jul 2012 Posts: 17

For those of you guys running Puppy on a USB stick, is there a big difference when booting/saving between a USB2.0 and USB3.0?

and if you happen to know, how does the speed of the CD compare to the USB?

Thanks

ravensrest · Posted: Fri 07 Sep 2012, 15:03 Post subject:

Don't know how much faster USB3 is than USB2, but I boot using USB2 from a 16Gig stick and it is significantly faster than CD.
BS

linuxbear

mikeschn · Joined: 27 Jul 2012 Posts: 17

Cool! Thanks guys. So I guess there's no need to run out and buy a machine that has USB3.0 Rolling Eyes

Mike...

sunburnt · Joined: 08 Jun 2005 Posts: 5087 Location: Arizona, U.S.A.

CD is pretty slow by comparison these days, but DVD is much faster.
And BlueRay I don`t have a drive yet. They`re even faster I`m sure.

The USB3 spec. is much faster than USB2, but the device is the speed limit.
I`ve had USB2 flash drives that were not much faster than USB1.1

It`s like the SATA interface, they keep making it faster and faster.
But 3.5 inch H.D.s are still the same speed ( approximately 60 MBs ).
S.S.D.s are able to make use of SATA`s blazing interface speeds.

dk60902 · Posted: Fri 07 Sep 2012, 22:53 Post subject:

Slacko, Lucid, and Saluki are 130 MB or less, savefile 512 MB for me, which means my computer needs to load ~650 MB into RAM, as I do frugal installs. USB 2.0 is up to 480 mb/sec and USB 3.0 is up to 5.0 GB/sec. Does that mean that USB 2.0 will load 650 1.5 secs into RAM, and USB 3.0 will load in ~ 0.13 sec into RAM, assuming maximum speeds? For a small distro like Puppy, is going to USB 3.0 really going to make a significant difference? Has someone installed the same Puppy on a USB 2.0 stick and USB 3.0 stick and booted from the same computer (obviously plugging the 2.0 stick into a 2.0 port and the 3.0 into a 3.0 port)? What has been your experience?

I just bought a couple USB 3.0 sticks, and I might buy a USB 3.0 PCI card to upgrade my system.

I had a couple computers that I sold recently that had Puppy frugally installed (slacko and lucid), and it loaded much more quickly than with a CD. The savefile was saved on the HD for both the HD and CD boot. I also booted from USB 2.0, and it was significantly faster than CD. However, saving the savefile to USB seemed fairly slow on my system.

sunburnt · Joined: 08 Jun 2005 Posts: 5087 Location: Arizona, U.S.A.

The save file is the biggest file in Puppy, so slow to save of course.

I`m trying to setup a transparently compressed Save file for Puppy.
It`d run and save/restore faster, and take less ram and USB space.

e2compr is light and simple and probably a good choice.

Btrfs is the new Ext4 replacement, and does on-the-fly compression.
It will be the next main stream Linux FS very soon, a good choice too.

Both require compiling a new kernel and some of the FS tools.