Running Windows from a flash drive

Sankari · 13 Jan 2009 at 10:19

Anyone done this? Is it a viable option? I'm guessing you'd need about 20Gb for Vista; does that sound right? Advantages/disadvantages of running your OS from a flash drive?

Answers on a postcard to this thread.

ChrisLX200 · 13 Jan 2009 at 10:31

Slow? 20MB/sec instead of 100MB/sec. 20GB a bit small?

Sankari · 13 Jan 2009 at 10:55

Hmm, for some reason I always assumed flash drives would be faster than HDDs. :confused:

Would an SD card be any faster?

I forgot that Vista requires 15Gb of free space in addition to the 20Gb for installation. :rolleyes:

Damn, it seems a good idea at the time.

ChrisLX200 · 13 Jan 2009 at 11:05

Not faster, if it's a USB flash drive then there's the bottleneck.

Sankari · 13 Jan 2009 at 11:11

slowrunner · 13 Jan 2009 at 11:43

The in-car pc guys tend to use compact flash cards for os drives, with n-lited XP installs. Think you need to disable write caching or something though otherwise the cards dont last very long.

It's been a long time since I read up on what they use and do though so I could be completely wrong, but then again we now have SSD's, anyone know for certain the life cycle of them?