Can anyone recommend any brands/models?

The idea is to have a complete OS on stick and bootup from it.


Asides from the motherboard supporting booting from a usb device, is there anything else that needs to be considered to be able to boot from USB (capacity, particular models)?

gracie

As long as the motherboard is capable, size is your only obstacle.

Got 3 OS' on USB sticks and work great, originally done for the Carputer, but use on a regular basis now.

Daz

thanks Daz.

Any brands / suppliers you can recommend?

If you take the cases apart you'll find most use the same chips.

Read / Write speeds differ widely.

As you say, most of them use the same chips, but some spend a little more effort on their pcb design.

Actually that makes no difference. (trust me, its what I do for a living) The read/write speeds are down to the chips and the data density.

Ok, So which should I opt for?

Remember, I want scorchio writing, if possible, some sort of write prevention mechanism and the icing on the cake would be a secure storage area for sensitive files.
Anything above 1GB

Look at the specs and see which one is the size you want and the speed you want.

1Gb limits your choice anyway.

Protecting areas of the file system is down to software, not the hardware. The flash drives appear to be a single removable disc.

Ok, how about brands to avoid?

Do you know of any shareware that can handle the security aspect I mentioned?

Anything REALLY cheap, they might fall apart.

The electronics won't be the bit to fail, more likely something will snap off, like the USB connector.

Iomega 4/6GB MicroMini £94/£118 USB2 no external power needed.

1GB USB sticks cost about £50 - £70 depending on make

misco.co.uk

Not sure what makes are good or bad tbh...

I have two 'Integrals' 1x1GB & 1x4GB and had no problems, the other has no name on it (pretty sure it was an ebuyer xtra value one 1GB).

Just make sure its USB 2.0 as its 40x faster than USB 1.1

Daz

i got a kingston one off ebuyer pretty cheap a while ago, only 256mb but its got me away from using ZIP disks so a huge improvement! Build quality seems good too.



Only problem i found is WinXP's obsession with how it handles local and network drives. Say if you had a 4 way usb card reader that gave you drives E, F, G, H, then you had a network drive I, when you plug the usb device in it will become I and kick your network drive out. If you had the usb card reader unplugged the first time you plugged the flash drive in then it would become E, then if you tried to plug both the card reader and memory stick in at once it wont let you use either. You then have to go to manage my computer and force everything to use different letters which you have to be computer admin to do which makes it all hard work.

Daz,

Did you use PE Builder to create the OS on your USB sticks?

Saw an article on Tomshardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20050909/index.html)

Followed all instructions but the final process of actually creating the OS on to USB failed.

Interested to hear what route you took when installing.

MareaMan,
I've seen a couple of those micro-harddisks.
They do seem handy and the pricing is a lot more competitive than their Flash equivalent.

What sort of warranty do Iomega give with their MicroMini? Are you happy with it?
The Disgo one I saw didn't have great transfer speeds and only had a 1 year warranty. I'm not too convinced with the durability implications.

These are plug and play. No OS install needed

eh?
To use as storage device, sure, plug n pray.

To use as a bootable windows OS, you gotta install something!