Sounds good! Basically, the problem I had boiled down to a super old driver no kernel dev wants to touch with a ten foot pole and they’re just kinda hoping it’ll die a death to irrelevancy, but there are a few systems out there that do still use it.

The rest of the design moved on to more advanced architecture.

I had this problem specifically dealing with the way that IOMMU maps devices conflicting with a really old USB root hub. I had to set something like intel_iommu=off for my case.

Would you be willing to share the output of your dmesg ?

Back in my day, we had this feature on Windows Vista called ReadyBoost that took advantage of the low-latency of flash media to supplement our slow HDDs. I’m not sure if there was a direct replacement for this in the Linux world. There are filesystems that take advantage of faster tiers of storage, but different latency tier exploitation isn’t something that I know to be readily available.

Today, 2GB of USB flash is next to useless, but I would consider a homebrew rescue system to restore your backups and fix problems without needing to prepare an external flash drive.