Installing Kali Linux on SSD (persistent storage)

[Black Rose]

Hello,
tomorrow I'm going to get an SSD and I would like to have Kali Linux on it because it is very slow on my external hard drive.
I forgot how I installed it on an external hard drive 2 years ago and can't find that exact guide which was amazing. I haven't used Kali Linux for a year so I'm basically a noob.
If anyone can explain how to install Kali Linux with persistent storage on an SSD I would be very grateful.

Thank you.

[gollem]

Download the amd64 image, download rufus, make sure you have a usbstick to use as a boot/install medium, start rufus and point it to the install image and the target (your usb stick), tell rufus to use DD image and not iso and let it write to the stick. Put the stick in the machine you want kali on and select it as primary boot medium, save and restart.
That should get you started.

[101]

Hello Black Rose.

There should no difference. Typically the Linux kernel accesses external drives the same way (through the SATA interface) whether they're traditional magnetic (spinning) disks, or modern solid state drives. So, on a system where a USB hard disk shows up as /dev/sdb, a USB SSD is likely to be /dev/sdb too...it should make no difference to anything you do. That's not to say the kernel can't tell them apart (on some systems, /sys/block/sdb/queue/rotational will be 1 if sdb is a spinning disk and 0 if it's a solid state drive, so "cat /sys/block/sdb/queue/rotational" will tell you which kind sdb is), and in some performance tuning scenarios it matters (as there are many different ways to partition and format disks, some better suited to particular physical hardware)...but you have described this as a "noob" install so for that you can just treat the external SSD like any other drive.

This means you don't need any additional guide: the official documentation will work. As long as you can boot from your external SSD, it's just a matter of choosing the correct drive (being very careful not to overwrite your internal drive, which will likely but not necessarily be called sda...double-check the sizes reported by the partitioner to make sure you're installing to the right one) at the disk partitioning stage, and then again at the GRUB installation stage. Again, provided your hardware is configured (through your hardware boot menu) to boot from the external drive, it will work once it has Kali and GRUB installed to it.