Is running centos 6 of a pen drive a bad idea ?
 

Config:
CPU: AMD 4000+ X2
2gb ram ddr2
standard asus modo
GPU: AMD 4670
Storage: 8gb pen drive (brand new)


I have installed CENTOS 6 on the pen drive, not using unetbootin, but using a cd(chose the pen drive as the harddisk, installing the bootloader on the pen drive itself. )

The system runs butter smooth at some times and lags at other times. FOr example typing
this post- the cursor would hang for a few seconds and then start working again. Switching tabs some times would be instant and other times laggy.

IS this a bad idea ? performance wise . I don't care about the life of the pen drive.
Is there anything that can be done to fix the lag ?

Thanks

A usb drive is only one way at a time

so it will be fine( maybe a bit slow) for some things and dead slow for other operations

also you are limited to the 46meg/s ( max.) read/write speed of usb2

I run a lot of usb installs. Most of the time the usb's work great. There was one usb flash drive that just would not run linux on a linux filesystem. It ran fine under windows but some weird cache issue it seemed.


As to your issue, you may be able to decide what it might be with some tests. As a test, you might try to re-install the OS with ext2 and no swap or some very limited swap if you think the usb tunnel is the bottleneck. The other choice is to get a new flash drive of a different make and try it.

In most of my installs I now tend to put a swap and either btrfs or ext4 and they work great.

Both kali and Fedora 18 are on ext4 formatted thumb drives
fedora is a full install ( 1gig swap)and kali is a live install with persistence .
the web works mostly fine , no real issues sometimes opining a new site dose take time .
Videos are a bit slow , but watchable


Fedora18 is not as fast in opening a new folder as opensuse12 is ( that is the installed os )
Turn off the 3d desktop and do not run 5 things at the same time .

run no-script and ad block to cut down on the work that firefox dose