Update: thank you ALL for all your input! 💐 After some back and forth with @thorry@feddit.org , I decided to simply swap between the two capture cards whenever I need to, in order to make room for my old 3080 and call it a day. This way, I won’t have to spend any more money on this project and I retain the processing power of the 3080 when I start encoding my raw captures.

I am just about to set up my new Linux machine, which will be used to convert analog video and audio to digital video and audio. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t run the system off of a live USB stick (say, a good quality one from Sandisk), that is, without installing Linux on the hard drive and not setting up a boot partition, a system partition, and all that?


I guess an SD card might be better. RasPis work from those for years just fine. Just don’t kill the power, power down nicely. SD cards are fragile on that
Interesting! Never thought of that, even though I am running three RPis 😅 I do have a micro SD card and a micro SD card to USB adapter… 🤔
Don’t if you value your data. Those are not intended for such tasks and will fail much sooner than your usual disk. Edit: read is fine, write is not