[Wylug-discuss] Booting from external SSD ... Your thoughts and experiences?

[Dave Fisher]

Hi,

I'm fed up of lugging a heavy laptop around, and I can't afford a
super-light new one, so I've been thinking of just carrying an
external SSD to on-site jobs.

My clients can usually supply a host system, monitor and keyboard ...
so their absence is unlikely to be an issue.

I've dabbled with taking just using a thumb drive, and that is usually fine.

But my experience of trying to boot from external USB is somewhat
dated, because more often than not I use the thumbdrive as mere data
storage for the host system.

That's largely because when I last tried to boot from USB on a regular
basis (possibly up to 5 years ago) I found a lot of old
non-USB-supporting BIOses around, and booting from GRUB on a CD was
similarly painful.

So, have things improved? Or is booting from external USB drives still
a bit of hit-n-miss?

Obviously, I could continue to use the thumbdrive data store with
Windows/Mac hosts, but it would be much nicer to have my own full
Linux development environment ... both on-site and overnight in
hotels.

If booting from external drives is now more viable, can I just stick
an SSD in an external eSATA/USB caddy? ... or do I need to by a
specifically 'external' SSD at twice the price (for a GBP 5  caddy).

Dave