Looking for assistance on a extremely slow usb install of Qubes-R4.0.4

Hi Everyone I having some serious issues with running Qubes on my laptop thru USB flash drive, some info to start with.

Lenovo P50
Intel I7 6820 2.7Hz
64 GB Ram
Dual boot system W10 Pro and ParrotOS both on ssd nvme M.2
Dual Graphics Intel HD Graphics 530 and Nvidia Quadro M2000m

I was able to install the ISO from another flash drive ( It took more than 4 hours ) the final usb drive is a PNY 256 GB and after boot up it’s running extremely slow, to the point that I can’t really do anything ( Been a newbie on this OS is not helping either ).
My question is do you guys think that I did something wrong on the install, is this thing using any of the ram in my computer, do I need to change some of the parameters on the vm’s to wake this thing up. I’ve been using usb flash drives for all kind of Os ( Tails, Kali, Pentoo, DragonOS, and a few more ) so this is not the first time and i have done this.
Finally do you guys think that burning a copy of Qubes in a nvme M.2 drive and using an external enclosure to connect thru usb 3.1 will improve anything. At this point I’m baffle on how slow this thing is running and any help will be appreciated.

Hi @urbanrunner, welcome to the Community!

The official Qubes documentation says that

High-speed solid-state drive strongly recommended

In Qubes, you have a lot of virtual machines, each of which requires a lot of reading/writing to the disk, often simultaneously. It’s no big surprise that a slow USB drive would dramatically slow Qubes down.

I have to agree with @fsflover on this one. Depending on the speed of your USB bus, you’ll be looking at some serious wait times as your machine boots.

I have a Qubes OS Live USB that I made myself, just to test it in various machines (before I buy them, for example) to see what works and what doesn’t, and I can tell you that the wait times are LONG……(like, 10-minute wait from cold boot to get into lightdm is the worst I’ve had)

That’s partly why the idea of a “Qubes OS Live USB” isn’t really practical (yet).

Unless you can get SATA or M.2 speeds through an external drive, you’ll be in for a bumpy ride.

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