Thumb Drive as boot drive??

**Punisher** · 07-25-2006, 01:30 AM

SO I know there are some impressively large USB Thumb drives out there.. I've seen them up to 8GB.

So my question is, could I use an 8GB Thumb Drive as a primary hard drive? Boot a windows OS off of it.. then use a secondary hard drive for storage of all my programs and what not?

I'm really just looking for an ultra-fast boot up/hibernate solution with out having a horribly stripped down worthless version of XP.. or Vista..

So what are my solutions??

**Tidder** · 07-25-2006, 03:12 AM

SATA?. Booting off of USB, esp flash media, is slow. You won't find a USB device that'll beat a SATA (or IDE I would think...) in boot times. Believe me, I've been down this road. Just use hibernation or standby and you'll be fine. Plus if you go flash, you'll have to make your OS read only, which is kind of a chore in itself. It's just a better choice to use your HDD for everything if you plan on using one anyway.

**Punisher** · 07-25-2006, 03:14 AM

So SATA.. Maybe then SATA in RAID0 config... or maybe just 1 raptor 10K?

**Tidder** · 07-25-2006, 03:17 AM

Naw, I wouldn't do raid in a car, or a raptor either, I haven't seen any amazing speed increases from those raptors. I think it's a load of crap personally. What's your other system specs that you're thilnking about/have?

**scott_fx** · 07-25-2006, 03:27 AM

what do you want to gain over using a regular harddrive?

**Punisher** · 07-25-2006, 03:33 AM

Just fast boot/hibernate times.

When I go into standby the computer barely takes any juice right?

**SFiorito** · 07-25-2006, 08:15 AM

yes, you can boot XP from a flash drive. it's very fast if you use the right drive. no spin-up, or seek time makes up for the slower transfer speed. I've used a couple different USB devices and it's possible. Standby is nearly instantaneous due to no waiting on the harddrive to spin up.

**IntellaWorks** · 07-25-2006, 08:24 AM

Using a SanDisk Extreme III Compact flash card my OS boots to Shell in about 7 -10 seconds. Thats including BIOS, the shell takes an additional 7-10 seconds to load, the shell is on an IDE drive.