[Live-demo] Testing 16 GB+ full install idea

[Alex Mandel]

Just a few notes on something we discussed in IRC.

Hamish and I discussed in IRC that once you have a 16 GB drive or bigger
it might make sense to simply do a regular hard drive style install as
opposed to a squashfs type system the DVD or current bootable USB uses.

I can verify as expected, this method works. It is a little dangerous to
do, in that one mistake in the drive assignment section could wipe your
existing hard drive. My recommendation is to disconnect your real hard
drive before doing the install.

It appears to be persistent without the performance penalty of a
persistent bootable drive. Long term I'm not sure if there will be
negative effects of /tmp writing to the drive as opposed to be cached
somewhere in ram. My suggestion is that when formatting leave 5-10% of
your usb stick unallocated. At least with SSDs this allows the drive
firmware to remap the unallocated bits to replace bad blocks when needed.

As others have pointed out the move to USB 3 drive in the next year
should greatly increase performance also, for those users that have USB
3 connectors. Some USB 2 users may also benefit too from better drives
that can actually max the USB 2 speeds.

Thanks,
Alex