Good USB Flash Drive for Installing Vista x64?

I am currently downloading Vista Business x64 to install on my MSI MS-1651. I am getting it free from MSDN through my school. I want to use a usb drive to install it since I do not have a dvd burner. What would you guys recommend?

 

I'm new to the pc-side of things, but if it's possible to use a card reader and a memory card, I'd consider that option instead, unless you don't have anything else that happens to use memory cards?

There are some pretty fast SDHC-cards out there (as well as fast readers), but the fastest cards are CF-cards (I have equipm. which uses those as well), so if are in the same situation, it might be a consideration since you can use the card for our equipment afterwards.

 

Those would be useless since I would have no use for them after I load Vista. I will use the USB Flash drive for a lot of different things. I think a 4GB would be enough space.

 

Well, if you have no use for it, then that's a bad solution. I was just thinking that most of us had a digital camera or something (it's audio recorders in my case), so I figured I'd put it out there.

 

I used to have a Canon D20, the 3MP DSLR, but I sold it since I never used it. It used CF cards.

 

There you go! Had my timing been a little different ...


Anyway, go for the fastest thumbdrive you can within your budget. Apparently 4GB is enough – I found this (to me) interesting link:

http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DA410C7F7E038D!1665.entry

 

Anyone else have a recommendation for a flash drive?

 

I wud say that would be slow as hell.
It will take you many hours to install.
Better get a external hdd or a dvd to do that work.

 

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but most flash drives are created equal. If it has enough space, and is cheap, you can't go wrong.

 

[my emphasis]

You don't honestly think a DVD will be faster, do you?

You'd be wrong.

 

I really will have no need for a DVD drive other than using it to burn Vista x64. That is why I wanted to get a USB Flash Drive. It cannot be too much slower. If it takes 1h instead of 30m then that is fine. I am actually going to need a 16GB Drive since Vista Business x64 is 8+GB

Edit: The downloader says Space required to unpack: 9414 MB, so I don't know exactly how much space I will need.

 

You might want to have a read of this then:

http://blogs.msdn.com/dglover/archive/2008/09/11/creating-a-bootable-usb-windows-vista-drive.aspx

Just get a 16G USB drive to be sure if you are worried - although I would have thought that the unpacking would get done on the Laptop HDD.

I have a couple of Sony Microvaults that I run Linux distro's from and they work really well - found them faster than my 16G SDHC card as well.

Corsair, Sony, ADATA are all good USB drives I have used now and in the past.

 

Once it is finished downloading and try unloading it will probably only be 3-4g since I looked on the torrent sites and all the x64 vista downloads are in that range. This install maybe the on with all the different Vista versions.