USB drives handle local LLMs and regular files

Portable AI setups on removable storage offer a friction-free way to maintain data sovereignty without sacrificing disk space.

• –High-speed USB 3.1 or NVMe enclosures are essential to prevent bottle-necking the initial model load.
• –File systems must be formatted as exFAT or NTFS to accommodate modern model files that frequently exceed the 4GB FAT32 limit.
• –Using subdirectories for models prevents clutter and allows standard file management to continue alongside local inference.
• –This architecture enables a "plug-and-play" AI experience across multiple workstations with sufficient compute power.