Best size USB for test driving Different Linux Distro's
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Best size USB for test driving Different Linux Distro's
Hey I played around with Linux years ago. But never got serious into using it. I ready to make the switch but I want to checkout a for distro's myself. So I was wondering what is the recommended USB drive size that is recommended for test-driving Linux and could I just use the same usb drive and rewrite and distro on it over the last one?
4 will do it for most distros. However, there is nothing wrong 8. Please keep in mind your live usb test drive will be heavily affected by the amount of ram. As long ass the stick is good feel free to flash and re-flash a new distro.
Distribution: Mainly Devuan, antiX, & Void, with Tiny Core, Fatdog, & BSD thrown in.
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A lot of distros are now over 4GB installed, so depending on whether you just want to run 'live' or actually install, 4GB, (1G or 2GB if you have them), to run 'live', (including the possibility to set up 'persistence' with some distros), but 8GB minimum if you intend to install & use it, allowing a couple of GB for your new data, & a 16~32GB will be a usable system disk size.
Distribution: Currently: OpenMandriva. Previously: openSUSE, PCLinuxOS, CentOS, among others over the years.
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You'd probably be struggling to buy a USB stick under 8GiB or thereabouts.
Usually, or at least once upon a time when DVD's were still popular, distro developers aimed at not making the ISO any bigger than 4.7GiB - so it would still fit on to a DVD. So with that general "rule of thumb" in mind, then 8GiB should be enough for at least most distro's - certainly for the most popular and mainstream distro's anyway.
32GB sticks are $10-ish at walmart, $15-ish for a 2x pack. 128GB sticks are near $40-ish each. I use 32GB sticks and rarely exceed 16GB in install data. User / game data on the other hand...
I've got MX-19 (w/ home persistence) on a 4 GB flash drive. I wouldn't worry much about the size -- as others have pointed out, you'd be lucky to even find something as small as 4 GBs in a store these days. I haven't looked online.
You can always use multiple sticks with a usb hub. One for $HOME and such. One for $HOME of a specific user and whatnot. Lots of options. With multiple machines you could have $HOME over an NFS share. $HOME only really matters once a user "logs in". Whatever suits your fancy. You don't really need one BIG one. And since linux is files on a filesystem, you could clone your install to another stick at any time. With special attention to /etc/fstab and the bootloader. Lots of options.
I've been using an old 4GB Sandisk Enterprise Edition (it was one of my first flash drive from years ago). I completed removed the security partition from it (it was one of these secure ones that made you enter a password to unlock it) and made it strictly my Linux USB test drive.
If you can get a few smaller (as in storage size) USB sticks for a good price, grab them while you can!
Even if they're slightly more expensive than a single stick with their combined storage volume, it pays when you test drive Linux distros a lot, or permanently keep one with a system rescue distro on it.
Hereabouts, you cannot get anything below 16GB anymore. Maybe very rarely some 8GB sticks.
Bought a 4 pack of 15 gig usb 3 pendrives on the cheap <15 bucks new egg > for persist pen drive installs
I have shoe horned a puppy install on a 128mb SD card once. Came out of a older kodak camera.
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