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I want to install Ubuntu on my external HDD. It says it supports USB 3.0. Was wondering will there be a drastic performance difference while using Ubuntu through external HDD or it's manageable? Can anyone please give me any metrics or difference in numbers. Thanks!

OS: Ubuntu 16.04 External HDD: Western Digital Passport Ultra (1 TB) Port: USB 3.0

Shahebaz Mohammad
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2 Answers2

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What I think is you should compare the interfaces instead of HDD itself, but why?

Most of the internal hard drives are 7200rpm and they're just slightly different in form of manufacture, however if we assume that we are talking about a good/normal 7200rpm hard drive then the only thing that matters here is the interface that we are using.

Here is a good comparison which helps you decide:

The theoretical maximums are as follows:

USB 1.1 = 1.5 MB/s
Firefire 400 = 50 MB/s
USB 2.0 = 60 MB/s
FireWire 800 = 100 MB/s
USB 3.0 = 625 MB/s
USB 3.1 = 1.21 GB/s
eSATA = 750 MB/s

So I guess it should be slightly slower.

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Ravexina
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  • I think it would be nice if you could compare these interface speed with the one used in internal, for example SATA 2.5 etc. I believe the speed will be much slower – Anwar May 16 '17 at 15:08
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As you'd probably expect, yes, it will be somewhat slower than an internal drive. In practice, the difference may not be significant. It really depends on your usage patterns, including:

  • How often you reboot. Unless you are dual-booting with Windows or have to power off the machine (e.g., because it's a laptop), you shouldn't need to reboot very often. This only matters in the sense that rebooting is an IO-heavy activity, sometimes the most I/O-heavy thing ordinary users ever do with their machine.
  • The size and number of files you access in the typical course of your work. If you are doing very heavy file I/O, as with frequent build cycles of a large software project, you may suffer, but probably moreso because you're using a spindle drive as opposed to flash/SSD.
  • The amount of RAM available in your machine. Swapping will kill the performance of any machine, but even before that, having lots of additional RAM will allow efficient caching.

In short, you won't know until you try, but it probably won't be that bad unless you're doing something very demanding IO-wise.

Bonus Tip

If you are going with the external drive route because you either want to try Ubuntu or because you want to run Ubuntu along with another OS like Windows, running Ubuntu inside a virtual machine can be a great way to do both, and performance is quite good with modern hardware virtualization support.

Many of the virtualization programs out there (e.g., VirtualBox, VMware), allow you to image an actual disk, so you can actually switch between different approaches, which can be great for prototyping servers that are to run on bare metal eventually.

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