Instaled LL 4.8 on a Corsair flash voyager GT USB3.0 64Bg - poor performance

[Sprintrdriver]

I recently committed to make myself an ultra portable "computer" - so I installed LL 4.8 onto this USB thumb drive.
I choose to encrypt the whole drive when running the installer, and I also disabled the internal drive on the laptop (ensure that the boot loader got to the thumb drive).

And that worked just nice. LL works and I can do everything I would do on any computers.

However, there is one problem - The performance. I was fully  aware that this may becoming an issue, so I was expecting some performance drop compared to a HDD.
But - the performance hit running on this USB device was much greater than I had anticipated, e.g. I need to wait about 2-3 minutes for the computer to turn off. And about ever single task seems bounded with a delay time for several seconds.

Therefore i ask if there is configurations I can change to make LL run "faster" when installed on a USB thumb drive ?

[robinc]

First of all the 620 has USB 2.0 only - so that's a bottleneck.
Second all the traffic is going back and forth on the one key - and all with an encryption overhead.

Back in the day I used a D610 as one of a number of machines with various flavours of linux.

I cannot remember which distro it was, but I installed to HD, created my OS as required and then converted back to a Live ISO.
It had the option to allow you to copy the OS to RAM and then remove the boot media. So, longish startup, but quick once loaded.
Data was all held on a second USB key.

Worked like a dream - but needed to be rebooted every few days. I was going to look at ways of stopping logging etc etc but never really got round to it.

[Sprintrdriver]

Well, the USB pen says "USB 3.0" so I assume that is true.

How much overhead does disk encryption add ? If it turn out to kill the performance on otherwise "slow" usb drives, then I consider adding a user where only  home folder are encrypted (i.e. not the whole drive).

I also consider testing if BTRFS may give better performance on usb pen drives - any one tested this out?

[robinc]

I'm not sure if you are suggesting that because the key is USB 3.0 then you should be getting USB 3.0 performance. If the port is USB2.0 then that is what you get.

The benchmark info about encryption suggests that 'generally' full system is better than /home only on the performance front. However that is just benchmarks and they are only good up to a point and they tend to be HDD / SSD oriented which is a whole different ballgame.

In the ideal world I'd suggest you get another identical key and see what happens with different types of install. Not all USB keys are equal - you may want to look into the specs of different mfrs products.