I have been doing this with a SSD between school and home. It worked perfectly if you have a similar hardware setup (which makes the drivers work on multiple machines). You just need to pull out a SATA cable out for desktop computers, but for laptops it is a hustle ( old Thinkpads like x220 you can easily replace hard drive).
One of the benefit is you don’t have to install dependencies once back to home to work on the same stuff.
I guess it stays for many seconds because it waits JavaScript to finish executing to get an image preview. It's not uncommon that some sites needs many seconds (or even longer) to load.