On Linux, is it safe to use an external USB hard drive for the /home mount?

So I'm going to give Linux Mint a whirl. As I understand it, /home is where users' content like documents, downloads, and media will be stored.

Because my SSD hard drive is small, I'd like to use a USB hard drive for /home. This raises a couple of questions:

• Is there anything inherently wrong or bad in doing this?
• Will it be reasonably safe and reliable, compared to using an internal SATA hard drive?

Assuming you have a quality USB port, cable, and external drive, it should should be as safe and reliable as using an internal drive, especially if you have USB 3.0, if you are using USB 2.0 you will likely see some very noticeable performance degradation.

You can do this, but it isn't recommended. The biggest reason would be that the hard drive would always need to be connected 100% of the time, which negates the "portable" aspect of a USB hard drive.

If the decision is between an external USB drive or an internal SATA drive, go with the SATA drive. It'd be faster (even on USB3), and there would be no accidentally disconnecting it if you forget that you're logged into a computer that needs the drive to run.

From a security standpoint, there are some issues if the drive is unencrypted and accessible to others. The first one that comes to mind is that your SSH authorized keys reside in your home directory. If someone "borrowed" the drive for a while, copied their own authorized keys to users' home directories, and then put the drive back, it might be possible for them to log in as those users if keys are enabled on the system.

You could obviously do this with an internal drive as well, but the external drive would be a lot more convenient and tempting.