On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 1:35 PM, Rick Stevens <ricks@alldigital.com> wrote:
On 10/05/2017 03:30 PM, Richard Shaw wrote:
> My last laptop had ESATA but there doesn't seem to be any ESATA SSD's
> available anymore, it looks like one company made one but they're
> discontinued.

Newegg lists several ESATA SSDs. Yes, they're (relatively) large boxes
that need a cable.

Well, the implication was that my last laptop did have ESATA, my current one does not so USBC/3.0 is the best option I have.

 
> I don't want to deal with an actual HD (SSD or laptop HDD)
> if I can help it. I don't want something on a cable dangling from the
> laptop when I have have a system on a stick.

That's what industrial-strength Velcro is for, my son! :-) My laptop
gets the occasional cellular modem stuck to its lid that way. It isn't
pretty, but gets the job done.

It's a work laptop and actually in the past I would carve out a few GB and dual boot but several years ago they installed McAfee Endpoint Encryption so that's no longer possibel.
 

Seriously, I'm just saying that running an OS from any USB device that's
on anything older than USB3 is going to suck, speed-wise--and I'm not
sure that USB3 is going to improve things a lot. I've never tried it,
but I've had no reason to do so.

You get reasonable performance with a compressed system like the default live image, but I just need an easy way to update it. It's got to be technically possible I just don't want it to be such a PITA that I never update it.

 
If that risk doesn't bother you, well, have at it! There are some
inexpensive, smaller USB SSDs out there you can try. Most do want USB3,
but will probably run on USB1.1 and USB2.0.

Yeah, no plans to do anything less than 3.0.

Thanks,
Richard