Running Windows on USB stick

SlyReaper · 27 Oct 2008 at 11:33

I've been wondering about this. Is it possible to plug in a USB stick, 8 or 16GB say, install an operating system such as Windows on it, and have it run well?

I know the sustained data transfer rate is limited to 16MB/s (I think), but the seek time should be absolutely fantastic because it's made out of the same sort of *stuff* that SSDs are made of. And as far as I'm aware, most things done by an operating system are seek operations.

So would I actually get a performance increase by running Windows off a USB stick rather than an internal 7200rpm HDD? I suspect the answer is probably no, but it's worth asking...

Edit: I think this is the right forum to ask because USB sticks are a sort of hard drive...

Blue Cypher · 27 Oct 2008 at 11:35

I dont hink its possible, not if you just plug it into any machine and expect it to work, it may be able to work if done on one machine, ie the stick only plugs in on the same machine, but even that im not sure is possible.

SlyReaper · 27 Oct 2008 at 11:36

It would only be used on one machine.

Nanobot · 27 Oct 2008 at 12:06

I have tried this once before after seeing lots of articles that show you how to do it. Its fiddly to make and once sorted, slow to load, so the answer would be - No, it doesnt run well in my case.
I then read that USB sticks can only handle so many thousands or millions of write cycles before it dies, and if you imagine, your pagefile etc would soon take its toll on the stick.
More articles do suggest and instruct on using a virtual ramdrive for this so to reduce the write cycles and less stress on the stick or maybe just to speed things up a little. I got bored after that, formatted it and went back to using the stick for files instead. Its one of those things you try once for novelty purposes and forget about.
Have a search for Windows In Your Pocket and have a read.

danielanthony · 27 Oct 2008 at 12:44

You would also be using the USB interface which has a throughput of about 25mb/s compared to SATA which can do much more.

I know you can run Linux off a pen drive but obviously the kernel is much smaller and is only meant for light tasks such as web browsing and file recovery etc.

MikeHunt79 · 27 Oct 2008 at 12:55

Ubuntu loads quite fast from my USB stick, but I tried to run windows and I was having USB driver problems which meant my stick was running at usb v1.1 speeds - slow!