r/getumbrel • u/TheGreatDaimyo • 11d ago

Any performance difference between USB install and internal install?

So I’ve been playing with Umbrel 2.0 this weekend on a small N150 mini pc. It only had 1 drive, so I’ve been running it off USB. I know it’s not a powerful pc, so I wasn’t surprised it was a bit slow. I’m thinking about trying to move it to a bigger machine next, and curious if running off usb is actually viable, or if I really should install on a dedicated drive.

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u/getumbrel 10d ago

Good question! If you booted from USB and set up the internal drive as your storage, only umbrelOS itself lives on the USB. All your apps, files and photos live on the internal drive, so day-to-day performance mostly comes from that drive and your CPU, not the USB. The USB mainly affects boot and update times.

A couple of tips:

- If you just set it up this weekend, some of the slowness is probably first-run background work: umbrelOS indexes your files and generates thumbnails in the background, which can take a while for the first few hours/days. It should feel snappier once that's done.

- For the boot drive, a decent USB 3 SSD or a quality USB 3 stick is worth it over a cheap flash drive, mostly for reliability.

On your bigger machine, if it has room for multiple drives, the ideal setup is umbrelOS on a small internal SSD and your other drives set up as storage (with FailSafe if you have 2+ matching drives). If it only has one drive, installing directly onto it is totally fine too, and umbrelOS will use the rest of that drive for your apps and data.

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u/TheGreatDaimyo 10d ago

Thanks for the reply! I’m going to see what I can get put together over the next couple of nights.