What are the pros and cons of installing and running Ubuntu from a microSD card? [closed]
I have a laptop with a spare microSD card. I am planning to install Ubuntu 16.04 on that card and use it alongside Windows. What are the pros and cons of running Ubuntu from a SD card? I don't think there are any pros apart from not having to disturb the Windows partitions. I assume lower read and write speed is one drawback. How slow would it be in layman terms? And what are the other drawbacks.
Any recommendations on the card will also be appreciated.
I think the limit is the card reader and not the card.
But how about you install a persistent system an that card. This way it's like a live system and more parts are loaded into memory. The boot takes longer but should be faster in use.
Writing to the card won't be very fast. But I think that's an option to try.
Please check first, that your computer can boot from the card reader
This link may help you install Ubuntu into your microSD card (an installed system like installed into an internal drive).
A good alternative might be to create a persistent live drive with mkusb
If problems to read or write later on, try according to this link.
Please notice that an SD card
is much slower
is much more sensitive to wear of the memory cells and corruption of the logical system to distribute the wear
than an SSD connected via eSATA or USB 3 or a high-end USB 3 pendrive. See this link and links from it.
In addition to the potential speed problems that already have good answers here, there is another issue that you may want to consider.
I assume you are talking about a built-in SD card slot, as is common in newer laptops. You need to make sure that this is a bootable device, and that it will play nice with your bootloader (GRUB or whatever). Some laptops have a BIOS option similar to "Enable Secure Digital (SD) Card Boot", which allows this. But others (for instance my Dell Precision) actively forbids access to the SD card slot during boot, as it's connected to the PCI-E bus, and not allowed to load the drivers that it would need to use it during boot.
It's worth noting that some people have had success using chained bootloaders in order to inject the drivers into the boot process, you may want to look over Ubuntu's official "boot from SD" page here.
Additionally, "boot managers" are also a potential solution for this, for instance the badly-named Plop Boot Manager.
Pros:
- Small
- Easy to (re)image using windisk32, dd or Etcher
- Various storage sizes to choose from
- Various speed classes to choose from
- Portable
- Everyone is doing it (Raspberry Pi, etc)
Cons:
- Faster Speed class equates to more money
- Seating, sometimes hard to get in/out of sd card slot in a laptop
- Sdcard slot access could be slower than say a USB3 sd card reader
- BIOS may want USB card reader vs installed SD Card Reader
- Virtual Machines have a hard time reading from an SD Card reader and prefer a USB SD Card reader at times. See this long post on issues: https://superuser.com/questions/373463/how-to-access-an-sd-card-from-a-virtual-machine
- Need OS to be sd card aware to avoid wear leveling issues. Look at these file system alternatives to help maximize your experience.
Lastly, I like the Sandisk Pro sd card family for my Linux distros.