Here’s the basics of my set up for what I can bring around:

  • A Crucial 1TB M.2 Drive
  • A M.2 Drive Enclosure that has USB 3.1 Gen 2 output So with these together are desktop performance in a small thing. It is not a flash drive that just gets ruined in like 3 months of constant use.

And with these, I use a Ventoy set up called Medicat. I love it, and there’s no issue with it for me, besides that Medicat/Microsoft requires NTFS for Windows stuff. Aside from standard NTFS bullshit, it’s wonderful.

Since I have so much space, I had the idea of storing a Linux set up for on the go use on any laptop/computer without needing to sign into 10 websites for one time use. Here’s my two methods of how to do it:

  • Make a persistent data block for Fedora/Ubuntu/etc. and make a Live ISO point to it, then boot from Ventoy into the ISO, which then handles mounting the “drive”.
  • Clear a space on the drive, install a distro like Fedora/Debian and encrypt it, allowing me to just run apt upgrade and move on like a normal PC.

Here’s the upsides and downsides to both that I can see, just thinking about it.

Persistence:

  • ✅ Don’t need to fuck with partitions of NTFS, last time I tried to shrink the drive NTFS had a breakdown and I couldn’t fix it.
  • ✅ Can expand the persistence as time goes on
  • ❌ NTFS constantly has issues with me, where I can cleanly eject the drive but I need to run ntfsfix to make it work again, and I don’t know when that will happen in the future.
  • ❓ Not sure how it will go with Arch Linux, but that might be a bad choice for a drive I boot into for fun/infrequently.

Partition and full install:

  • ✅ Easier to just get going, point an ISO to install there and good to go.
  • ✅ Easier to upgrade to new packages/editions, instead of downloading new ISOs and pointing it each time. I’m unsure if it would let me use a .dat file from Fedora 36 for Fedora 40, for example.
  • ✅ I can encrypt it so I don’t need to worry about people nabbing it and messing with personal files.
  • ✅ I can use something like ext4 or btrfs, so I don’t need to rely on NTFS.
  • ❌ Trying to resize NTFS was really fucky, and felt like I was breaking something. I did break it, and had to reinstall Medicat/Ventoy.
  • ❓ I’m unsure of how to boot from it and keep Medicat/Ventoy as the main option. Maybe create a file on Ventoy to boot the distro? Maybe it varies from BIOS to BIOS?

Wanting to hear the thoughts from people smarter than me, maybe have done this before. I just want to make it clear It’s not a USB flash drive, this won’t break randomly from one too many R/Ws.