Boot up from an USB drive
By flowerhorn
@flowerhorn (1008)
Malaysia
November 1, 2008 9:36am CST
I was wondering about the above idea for a long time and finally I decide to ask you all here. Is there anyone of you here boot up from an USB drive? Is it faster than booting up from a PATA hard disk? My thought is it should be faster because USB drive storage consists oif non moving parts; they are actually memory chips used to store our data while hard disk data are transferred by spinning the disc plate with its data picked up by the spindle.
3 responses
@decimus785 (1419)
• Aruba
1 Nov 08
I don't boot from USB drive.
but i once booted from a USB Thumb drive running portable Windows XP Live USB Edition and takes longer than booting from a PATA Hard Drive.
@flowerhorn (1008)
• Malaysia
1 Nov 08
Hmmm, thanks for the feedback. I wonder why the boot up speed is slower. Perhaps it is the transmission speed from the USB drive to the motherboard that is slower than those of from hard disk to motherboard bus bar. I would like to get a SSD but they are very expensive at the moment.
@flowerhorn (1008)
• Malaysia
2 Nov 08
Hey, do you mean to say that we will have faster USB flash drive bootup if our cpu system has PATA drives in it? If yes, then I think it is worth to invest in an USB drive to make our system faster.
@mirage108 (3402)
• United States
4 Nov 08
Yes it is possible to boot from a USB drive. you would want to intall the minimum system requirements to it, and a good up to date anti-virus program on it, this way if your computer is infected then you got a clean way of removing the virus or other infection your computer might get, I would not do it regularly though
@flowerhorn (1008)
• Malaysia
4 Nov 08
Thanks for taking the time to answer my thread. But do you find booting up from a USB drive is faster than booting up from a hard disk? Booting up from a USB drive is only possible if your pc BIOS supports it, or else one would have to resort to hard disk and CDROM booting. Aside from that, we also have to install special bootup software to our USB drive if it does not come with the Boot Up feature.
@kingparker (9673)
• United States
22 Nov 10
I don't know how fast it gonna be, but that is a great idea though. You could get it done through flash drive, and still you must stick that USB flash drive to the USB port all the time. I never done it, but the idea is doable.
