Booting from a USB drive?

[latrosicarius]

Hi,

Does anyone know if using a USB stick as your master creates any performance decreases?

Also, if booting from a (gigabit) network decreases performace either?

Thanks

[RavenNight]

Hmm... I know a couple of people who have used USB/Flash drives in really small PCs, your limited to the badnwidth of the drive and port (USB 1.0/2.0 etc). Though the ones I've seen haven't had any massive slow-down. As for gigabit network, then it would rely on the server, esepcially with gigabit.

[KowShak]

USB Flash is slow compared to a hard disk, orders of magnitude slower.

Gigabit ethernet is too, you're still booting from a hard disk (perhaps a fast one ?) but there is a network between you and the disk so its slow. Even with fast gigabit network cards and fast disks in the server it won't be as fast as having a local hard disk.

Laptop drives are the way to go for really small PCs.

[Nox]

also most mem sticks only cope with x thousand read/write operations per bit, so using one for a continually changing OS is generally a bad idea, unless you use a prepped OS that dumps all the files that get changed into regular memory first.

Nox

[latrosicarius]

Oh ok, I guess I will use a normal drive then.. thanks