Portable drive help
Recently, I decided to install and have Firefox Portable run on a spare USB drive that I have (for the sake of using the browser for internet-related tasks at college, instead of the crappy uncustomised Edge that always loads up at start-up).
Now, for the first time I did it, I installed the portable version of Firefox 129 onto the USB (and on the Windows 7 laptop), so that I can run it on any of the college's Windows 10 PCs but, Firefox was very slow and sometimes be unresponsive to the point of it causing the USB drive to have errors, and had to format it after they were fixed. Upon some research, I found out that the USB had to be formatted to FAT32 for the program to run properly but even when I did this, it still ran very slow on the college PCs.
My next theory would be the fact that a 2GB USB drive wouldn't be beneficial for it and might want to get one of larger disk capacity, or do I have to format it into NTFS or exFAT so that the portable Firefox can run with no problems.
Just want everyone's help with this, and point out what I was actually doing wrong. It's the first ever time I've done something like this so just bear with me.
Now, for the first time I did it, I installed the portable version of Firefox 129 onto the USB (and on the Windows 7 laptop), so that I can run it on any of the college's Windows 10 PCs but, Firefox was very slow and sometimes be unresponsive to the point of it causing the USB drive to have errors, and had to format it after they were fixed. Upon some research, I found out that the USB had to be formatted to FAT32 for the program to run properly but even when I did this, it still ran very slow on the college PCs.
My next theory would be the fact that a 2GB USB drive wouldn't be beneficial for it and might want to get one of larger disk capacity, or do I have to format it into NTFS or exFAT so that the portable Firefox can run with no problems.
Just want everyone's help with this, and point out what I was actually doing wrong. It's the first ever time I've done something like this so just bear with me.
Comments
NTFS is a poor choice for external drives. There is little need for exFAT unless you specifically need files over 4gb in size. FAT32 can have performance issues when there are many, many thousands of files in one directory, but I don't know how much of an issue that is on newer systems.
To help avoid corruption, only unplug the drive after shutting off the computer. Something like a web browser has so much going on, it may be writing files even after you, or even the "eject" function, think the web browser is closed.
You know, I think it is that (more so when it's being created as soon as I run Firefox for the first time on it). Not sure would using a memory card would be a better option for that sort of thing, as I have plenty of these.
Also, thanks for that tip (and maybe I should've known that myself, when the light of the USB drive kept flickering even after Firefox was closed, even when I had to close it down via Task Manager).
If it is not doing it already, I'd try to have Firefox create the cache in the Windows temporary directory on the hard drive.
Well in one classroom, there's a card reader present, unless I can get one for myself for the computers of all my classes.
Set:
browser.cache.disk.enable = false
That should give you a big performance boost. Hardly any downside.
You can use something like f3 - fight flash fraud to test and confirm your USB drive is legit working (not corrupting data). Counterfeit USB drives are a huge problem, and even the good ones go bad from time to time.
I can confirm that my USB drive is indeed legit (as I got it as part of a new computer via a grant years ago), so there's probably no need to use that (although would if I was stupid enough to pick up one lying about on the street).
As for that command, I'll keep it in mind next time I wish to reinstall the portable Firefox on my USB drive (as it's then known that I don't really need to use a portable browser whilst at college, as my settings are saved after signing out as long I'm stationed at that same computer in each of the classrooms I'm in at all time).