Based on a comment, I'm trying to make this a technical question rather than an opinion question–performance of two proposed hardware configurations.
I want to switch back and forth between Linux and Windows on my laptop. I'm doing some performance heavy processing that requires large files.
I benchmarked my 5400 RPM laptop HDD as such:
USB 3.0 flash drives claim to get many times that. I understand that there are various modes of read/write/seek and speeds vary depending on file size as well. Given the properties of the different storage devices, would there be any performance advantage to me running a VirtulBox VM from a flash drive VS my HDD?
Also, if I wanted to go dual boot, which would perform better, partition on my HDD or boot from USB?
Best Answer
Short answer:
Yes, a USB3 flash drive attached to a USB3 port would most certainly be faster than a 5400RPM hard drive. I've run Windows-To-Go from a flash drive before, and the performance is on-par with being booted from the internal SSD.
HOWEVER...
You will also burn up that flash drive very quickly. Virtual machines are very I/O intensive. USB flash drives are not designed to handle that kind of load on a long-term basis the way SSDs are.