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with usb at about 256gb - 1tb now. Looking forward to a world were everyone carries their computer in a usb.

I was using portable apps off of a USB stick what must have been 15 years ago.

I thought this was the future back then, but now we all just carry entire computing devices with more storage than that and call them phones.

https://portableapps.com/

I can't believe it's still in development.

For me, my portable Apps phase was about 10 or so years ago...and it felt so awesome! I also thought it would be the model for the future! :-)

Write throughput and flash lifetime are still a concern for that.

Laptops typically have 8 GB or more RAM which is a lot more than you need of r a lightweight OS; perhaps the rest could be used as a cache that is periodically flushed to the USB. For most uses of such a device there isn't much writing going on anyway.

You could buy a USB enclosure for an M.2 NVMe SSD - a bit bulkier but still portable and addresses your concerns.

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