Running an OS off USB FLASH DRIVE

[Sofronitsky0423]

Anyone have any experience with this? The thought occurred to me the other day while looking for a new HDD to run an OS on... I did a little searching and saw other ppl. have done this. Just looking for a little info. I would be using a trimmed down XP Pro version (I made using nlite) thats less than 300gb. Would this be the best solution for someone putting together an audio only Computer? Foobar2000 (FLAC-USB-External DAC)... no movies, no games... only audio. The alternative would be a 36 gb WD Raptor for $100... I'd rather use a cheap USB flash drive.... Thanks

 

[Sofronitsky0423]

Thread deleted... I should have read into this more before starting a thread sorry...

 

[Herbal]

First hit from Google gave this link.

There's two things that spring to mind when mentioning running an OS from a USB stick and that's this.

Don't forget about the page file. XP really needs to have a page file and for a normal OS I find a 1024Mb size is a good cover all for any system disregarding the size of the RAM. Since you mention that it's only for audio I guess you could get away with 256Mb or even 128Mb but only with 512Mb+ system RAM. Less than that and WinXP is gonna really crawl and moan...but then again it may work fine (just don't load up your 1000+ albums into a playlist

)

The second issue is that USB drives do have a limitied lifespan upon how often each block can be written to (although this is getting into the million re-write range now) and as such, pagefiles, caches and other such temporary disk based storage is not good for USB drives.


Why not just pick up a cheap 40Gb/80Gb IDE/SATA drive. Something like a Spinpoint or Barracuda 7200.7/10 should be silent (and since it sounds like you'll be streaming media disk access should be minor and thus noise minimal).

 

[Packgrog]

Won't work with Windows. I've tried.

Linux runs just fine off of a USB drive, though. Kinda slow, but it works. Hell, one distro (DSL, or Damn Small Linux) is even distributed on USB keys.

-Packgrog

 

[Calroth]

Another thing you can consider is a Compact Flash drive connected to an IDE adapter. You use it to replace an internal hard drive; it looks the same as a hard drive to the computer (so there's no compatibility problems and no need for a special version of Windows). Compact Flash drives are relatively cheap for 2 or 4GB capacities, and IDE adapters are around the $5 mark.

 

[error401]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Calroth /img/forum/go_quote.gif Another thing you can consider is a Compact Flash drive connected to an IDE adapter. You use it to replace an internal hard drive; it looks the same as a hard drive to the computer (so there's no compatibility problems and no need for a special version of Windows). Compact Flash drives are relatively cheap for 2 or 4GB capacities, and IDE adapters are around the $5 mark.

Indeed. I wouldn't recommend installing Windows on one though, as was mentioned flash memory has a limited number of write cycles before failure. Usually it's around 10-50 thousand. This seems like a lot, but you'd be rather amazed how often your OS writes to your hard drive; saving the registry, the page file etc. etc. The lifespan of such a setup would probably be measured in months or less for a system on 24/7.

This works better with Linux mainly because it's possible to use a root filesystem that uses RAM to store any file changes, and because the OS doesn't require a pagefile for proper operation. I've heard of Windows running on a USB flash drive before, but the reports I've heard are that it's very difficult to get working, very slow, and there's no way to avoid serious deterioration of the flash memory (since Windows doesn't have any filesystems designed for flash memory, or any use-a-ramdisk-for-changes ones either).

In short, it's not feasible on Windows. You'd be okay if you were willing to use Linux and used a distribution that was designed to run from flash, like DSL.

 

[musicmind]

This might help :
http://rz-obrian.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/knoppix-usb/

 

[Chu]

Just to comment on this thread, I agree 100% with the CF recommendation. I've built a linux file server before using a 4Gb CF card for root and boot partitions and it's been working like a champ.

Keep in mind though that any flash solution is going to be incredibly slow for most operations that are i/o bound. Flash memory has a random access time orders of magnitude greater then hard drives, but a throughput orders of magnitude less. In general this is a huge hit.

Solid state drives get around this by having the memory chips running in massively parallel configurations. The custom controllers combined with the limited demand is probably responsible for their exorbitant markup over CF.

Also, it is in fact possible to run windows without a pagefile, the option to disable it is right in the VM pane. It shouldn't really give you any problems moreover the inherent problems with throughput listed above.

 

[Calroth]

Yes, you can turn off the pagefile in Windows. Normally you wouldn't want to, but given the context of the question (building a media/audio server), it should be fine. Not sure about the other parts of Windows versus the lack of wear levelling, though. But CF cards are cheap... if the worst happens, just go back to eBay every few months for a new one

But the music server thing raises another question: where are you going to store your music? Obviously you can't fit much music on any given flash drive, so you'll need a hard drive anyway. And why the 36GB Western Digital Raptor, of all drives? That sounds like a SCSI drive (or one of those pro-level SATA ones), which is overkill.

 

[Chu]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Calroth /img/forum/go_quote.gif But the music server thing raises another question: where are you going to store your music? Obviously you can't fit much music on any given flash drive, so you'll need a hard drive anyway. And why the 36GB Western Digital Raptor, of all drives? That sounds like a SCSI drive (or one of those pro-level SATA ones), which is overkill.

I just caught this. I'm going to stretch a bit and assume the op thinks solid state = faster, and is comparing CF to Raptor drivers. It's not. CF is going to preform absolutely horribly for any i/o bound operation.

By the way, anyone else excited that the next version of OSX is going to use ZFS? I've been putting off building a multi-terrabyte file server with redundancy because every solution out there except ZFS has some major downsides for a consumer application. ZFS is going to become a dream come true, mutlti-drive striping systems with 2 parity disks and completely upgradable! I was debating buying an older solaris box to take advantage of it but now that it's coming to OSX I can't wait