Installing/LiveCDing from a USB

Is installing a distro or booting into it's 'LiveCD' interface faster from a flash USB compared to a CD? If so, is it noticeably faster?

 

It's easier to just burn an ISO to a CD than to set up a USB flash drive to boot, however I think it's more rewarding and also faster to use a flash drive. I currently have BackTrack linux on my flash drive. It's nice to have both read and write options, not just read. Makes configuration easier and saves my settings the way I want them. Different distros have different methods for installing to flash drives. Some are as easy as extracting an archive and running a batch file (backtrack is like this), others require manually setting a bootable flag on the USB drive and other configuration.

 

Yes, if you really need to boot a live distro more often, use a usb flash drive.
Especially the spin-up for the cd-rom drive takes some seconds what is very annoying. So yes, it's not only noticeable, it's a huge difference.

By using a flash drive the PC might feel like the OS is actually installed (only slightly slower).

 

What about the lifespan of flash drives? How long do they usual last?

 

Depends.
If you use a live distribution on it, it will be read-only most likely, so the lifespan is more or less infinite.
If you install a standard distribution on it, there might be partially much writes on certain parts of the memory that may be destroyed after months or years, so the capacity would decrease.
I wouldn't worry.

 

Most flash drives can survive about 1,000,000 writes per sector. This sounds like a lot, but running an OS 24/7, this will be hit in about a month. If you plan on using this A LOT, then I suggest dual booting, or if you need it in another computer, looking at a small external hard drive. If none of those tickle your fancy, research which drives seem to last longest. I found in school that using a ton of portable apps all the time would kill my flash drives in ~2 months, but those also were crappy flash drives. I've had my Sandisk Cruzer Micro for a while and had no problems. I now buy Transcend flash drives and regularly back them up. They have a lifetime warranty, so it doesn't matter if it dies, because I will be getting a free new one anyway.

 

Since you can't tell it not to use those parts of the memory, you end up with a ton of data corruption. Once a flash drive has bad sectors, THROW IT AWAY. It's not worth the risk. 4GB flash drives cost 7 dollars.

Oh, and it's not like a small chance of data corruption. It's 100% chance of happening, it's just when? And I've found that when usually is about one day.

 

Most flash drives have a controller that detects and immediately disables defect blocks and maps to other - working - areas, so I wouldn't mind.
However, if you detect that there's a bad sector, the controller is **** and you should get rid of that drive, so I partially agree.

 

Well, my "plan" is to try to find a way to get up a flash usb to contain multiple Linux distro/LiveCDs, and with a grub menu (or something like that), be able to boot or install any distro from the selection. Is this plan 'ambitious but rubbish'?

 

You could certainly do that, but I don't understand why you would want to?
Unless you are demoing the OOBE of multiple distros to someone, I can't see this being practical. Why not just customize one distro to do what you want, and use that?

 

"OOBE"?

Well, because this way I can use it to install, say, different variants of Ubuntu for a friend, or arch, or XP for a friend without having to lug around my 'distro/OS cd pouch'.

 

OOBE = out of box experience. So what the OS is like installed fresh without modifications.

So what you're looking to do is get it to boot installers? I mean, for linux it's easy since you can install to a hard drive from inside the OS, but with Windows you're going to have more trouble... Not to mention there are a ton of versions of XP (Home OEM, Home Retail, Pro OEM, Pro Retail, and so on) and each uses a different disc... do you plan on carrying all of those with you?

 

That's my point. I'm going to put all that stuff into one flash drive so it can do all that for me - to boot installers and/or Live desktops in one small device.

For my XP, I prefer to install my version because I slipstreamed Prof with SP3, so it's easier to manage post-install.

 

I've used UNetbootin to set up a USB drive to act like an Ubuntu LiveCD. It's still a read-only session, but it does boot a lot faster. Installing from the USB drive is also a whole lot faster. I use the mode where you download the ISO and then have UNetbootin "install" it to the USB drive.

Homepage:
unetbootin.sourceforge.net

I don't know whether you could tweak it somehow to support booting multiple different OS's from the same USB though.

 

I'll give it a look. Thanks!

 

i second UNetbootin. it works awesome for doing live distros on a usb. and it is was faster in my opinion. but it dont do multiple distros at one time though.......