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best/fastest USB thumb drive for installing an operating system on

W

wpshooter

Golden Member
I am looking for the best/fastest brand of USB thumb drive onto which I plan on installing a version of the Ubuntu/Linux operating system.

I am going to actually install and boot/run the operating system from the drive NOT just place the ISO image on it.

What brand, model & size of USB thumb drive would be your recommendation ?

Thanks.
 
OCZ Rally2, Corsair VoyagerGT, Sandisk Cruzer Contour, Super Talent PICO, Kingston HyperX.

Generally you will want to stick with 8GB or less otherwise the type of flash memory gets slower to meet the size demand.
 
Would the presence of this U3 thing I am reading about make a difference in what drive I choose, seeing that I am going to be installing Ubuntu/Linux O/S on this USB drive ?

Do I want the U3 feature or does it make any difference one way or another ?

Thanks.
 
Once you format the drive to NTFS all software/apps on the drive will be gone.

One thing to keep in mind, USB drives (all solid state devices, really) have a limited number of "writes" per sector before they wear out. If your OS sets up a page file on the drive, it will make frequent writes to those marked sectors and your drive will wear out more quickly than you might expect.

You can potentially help this issue by creating a ramdisk and placing your tmp/temp files, temporary internet file and pagefile on it. Also make sure you turn off automatic disk defragmentation as this serves no purpose on SSD drives and will just hasten drive death.

Compact flash cards on an IDE adapter are another possible solution as they have write-leveling built in (so no sectors get used more than others). Or you could just find one of those cheap 30GB SSD drives (around $50 after rebates, I've heard).
 
it is a generally bad idea to do what you are suggesting. Can you specify WHAT you want to do with it so we can give out some suggestions on alternative courses of action? (or better recommendations about this course of action)
 
May i ask why you are doing this?

Performance isn't going to be great, & the drive will more than likely crap out sooner than normal, as has been mentioned.

Mainly what i'd recommend looking for is drives with fast write speeds, as generally read is fine, but write is always a weak spot.
 
Other than the task that I stated in my original post, i.e. to install and run Ubuntu/Linux O/S from the USB key drive, I want to be able to take this USB key drive edition of the O/S to other computers for demontration purposes. I want something I can carry in my pocket and not some standard size (or near standard size) drive to carry around.

I have been advised that this is very doable on a USB key drive. Have I been mis-informed ?

Thanks.
 
It's certainly doable but there are a few things to keep in mind.

Since you're only using this occasionally you will probably get around the wear problem.

Know up front that if you're using this for demos it may be (a lot) slower than you really want if you're trying to impress people (depending, of course, on what specifically you're doing once you get into the OS).

Some system BIOSes (OEMs especially) may not support booting from a USB drive, you're going to be SOL on those machines.
 
Someone told me Mandriva was good for this.
I am also looking for something similar because i will be backpacking and don't want to worry about having anything heavier than a waterproof pen-drive.
Still trying to figure out which distro is best for general use while traveling (web/email/basic progs) and which drive is best for repeated wear. Don't know how long these are expected to run reliably in this scenario.
 
Originally posted by: Scorponok
Someone told me Mandriva was good for this.
I am also looking for something similar because i will be backpacking and don't want to worry about having anything heavier than a waterproof pen-drive.
Still trying to figure out which distro is best for general use while traveling (web/email/basic progs) and which drive is best for repeated wear. Don't know how long these are expected to run reliably in this scenario.
Click to expand...

if you're back packing, what computer are you going to use?

But for a case like this where all you need is internet access, go with DSL or TinyMe
 
I'm going to pick up a 16B soon too for installing OS. I'm planning to put as my OSes including windows as i can cram on this sucker. I generally hit up my server for RIS, and about 8GB of random autoinstall programs, but a 16GB should practically make my server obsolete!!! Amazing how far we have come. Here is a nice roundup of current flash drives i found (people really need to review more of these things)

http://*****/GetDoc.aspx?doc=91&page=14

I wouldn't worry about wear leveling at all, by the time you get to that point, we will have 1.21 trillion jigabyte thumb drives for $10 by then!
 
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