That few watts or less different between usb stick and ssd not going to cost you any noticeable amount of money .
if you are using 1 watt and paying 0.25$/kwh , you paying around 2.2$ for a year
if you are using 1 watt and paying 0.10$/kwh , you paying around 0.9$ for a year
SSD much faster
I see. Thanks for the charts and comparison. But have you actually tried using a USB for a mining rig? I am curious as to how stable it is, regardless of speed. Power cost-consumption can be higher in some places and when you have a lot of rigs, the savings, no matter how small, can still stack up.
USB 3.0s or those portable disks should work fine right?
The problem is you concentrating on a few dollars electricity price different between USB drive or SSD !
Let see if you have to reboot you mining rigs , with USB boot you might need time somewhere between 90-120 second with windows 10 , with the properly configured SSD install you need 30 second or less , so miner can start work 3-4 time faster with SSD than booting from USB ! So after each boot you can start earning money 60-90 second sooner with SSD
we are talking about very very small amount of money what you can earn , or lose with the power usage of ssd or usb / booting time
Yes i tried mining from usb installed os, i dont like it all bc its much slower that ssd , time is money
Yes you can run Linux , Windows from USB without any problem.
If you thinking to buy USB3 portable disks for you booting device , i just dont understand why you not using internal hdd or ssd , also external usb hdd are drawing more power that USB flash drives