So I've installed my distro on a USB stick, intending the stick to be my hard drive. I already regret it, because I didn't realize it would be this slow (especially when writing). Applications, especially my internet browser, keep freezing for short periods of time. (I haven't put a swap space on this stick, if it would help.)

I had been told about using a stick to make a liveCD instead of a normal hard drive installation, but chose not to. If I did run a USB liveCD instead, would it probably run any faster on account of loading itself into the RAM?

You have a lot of issues here.

One is slowness of installed usb. As to why I can't say. My usb installs work quite well on many usb flash drives. I had one USB 3.0 that just would not work. Might be that you have an odd usb or might be a ram/swap issue. We might find an answer for that if you want.


Second issue is the "Toram" or other boot option that may be available to your distro. I forget the other names but many common distro's can be loaded to ram. Generally they are all live cd/dvd versions. The reason is that way back when Knoppix was making his live cd's, he found that he could put something like 3G worth of data in a cd in compressed form. That serves two uses. One is you move less data over slow cd access. Second is you can load to ram and only use 700 mb.


Last of your issue is a live cd to usb. The live to usb almost always still uses a compressed file that may increase speed on some few systems. In general, the usb speed ought to be OK for a common distro. If the bottleneck is the usb for some reason then moving only a compressed file or part of to the ram would be faster than moving the expanded part to ram to use.

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A live-cd is usually using a squashfs compressed image which reduces the size of the installed apps/data and therefor reduces the amount of data that must be read, so it will enhance e.g. booting or starting big apps like Firefox.

The "toram" option offered by some live-cds offers to load the whole squashfs file into RAM in one go before proceeding. Once that is done, the rest (booting / launching apps) will fly at lightspeed.

Eventually, if you write alot, a faster USB stick is still recommended because some cheaper sticks are really very slow at this and the differences between USB stick models are sometimes huge.

I've installed a regular system on a USB stick which can read about 28 MB/s and write about 15 MB/s which isn't super-fast but alright, i can live with that. Some sticks are even ten times faster than that while others are ten times slower..

I don't suppose I could put a liveCD on a stick that already had a Linux operating systemn installed, could I?

You can also use e.g. GRUB to load a plethora of Linux installations from the stick, just like if they were installed on a local harddisk. Additional Live-CDs copied to the stick can also be booted but require special entries in the grub.cfg. I currently don't remember the exact formula(s) and those also depend on how the particular Live-CD was designed in the first place. But it's possible..

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So is it as simple as installing the liveCD on the stick and then adding the GRUB entries for my desired liveCD to the existing GRUB menu?

To anyone wanting to install a distro on a USB stick as a hard drive, I would not recommend the Kingston Datatraveler model.

You do need to pass the correct commands/params, e.g., the root file system is not some /dev/xxx but a squashfs file. Can sometimes be a bit tricky to figure out. Like i said, it also depends on the exact distro.

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