Re:I'm booting my Raspberry Pi 4 from a USB SSD
by zamadatix on Sunday June 14, 2020 @02:08PM
(#23519835)
It's a gigabit network adapter. Ignoring the extra CPU overhead, latency, etc. that alone limits storage to less than SATA 1 speeds. UASP drives on the USB 3 port can push near SATA 3 speeds with lower latency and less CPU overhead.
At home I have couple of older laptops my kids use for various things. I have installed linux on them and configured to boot over wifi and it actually sped up these machines significantly. I would not advise for everybody to do this, though. The setup is complex (there is no built in support in any distro and you are pretty much on your own) and you need excellent wifi coverage (I have no less than 5 5GHz access points to cover the area densely).
One thing flash card will be difficult to beat is random small accesses if the only thing you care about is latency and not throughput.