Storing data on 3.0 "leave in" USB or on the SSD?

Firstwatch

Hello All,
hoping someone can educate me as to the best course of action, as my computer is so new.
I recently bought an Asus Zenbook UX305 which I'm loving, which has a 128gb SSD. It has 3 x 3.0 ports, so I've bought an Integral Fusion 128gb 3.0 USB drive to sit permanently in one of these and increase the memory capacity obviously.
My question is, where should I be storing my data that is not related to the laptop's operation, on the USB or the SSD? will having data on the USB slow the laptop or otherwise affect it's performance?
I'm not about to replace the SSD with a higher capacity one for now, until the manufacturer's warranty runs out at least...

victor2

It depends on your data. If it's things like photographs and documents then I'd keep it on the USB drive. If it's a heavily used database then maybe the SSD would be better. Applications should be installed onto the SSD. Either way, popular opinion seems to be that for performance, you should keep at least 25% of the SSD free. The operating system uses disk files heavily and you don't want those to be scattered over the SSD as it will not give optimum performance when using them.

Fightsback

Do not treat flash drives (the integral fusion) as permanent storage, flash drives have much shorter life spans than HDs or SSDs and are more error prone, yes they are also much slower than the internal SSD. Only ever consider flash drives as a temporary means of conveying data, make sure you have backups elsewhere.

Avoid pulling out the flash drive while laptop is running as this can lead to file corruption, especially if it is being written to at the time.

There's been plenty of threads on this forum asking how to fix a corrupted flash drive and they had important documents on the drive which were not backed up else where and were not able to recover them.

Doshwaster

I've also recently bought myself the UX305 as my Christmas present to myself. It's a fantastic device - incredibly light and starts up within seconds. My previous laptop would take ages to be usable.

For me the 128GB SSD is big enough for now but those "leave in" USB drives do look like a good way of adding extra capacity. However, I would still want a separate copy of the data elsewhere just in case the worst happens and to make the data available across your devices.