USB Flash Drive media handling and using.

Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own wayNaples, FL Icrontian
edited December 2011 in Hardware
This thread will probably say I am crawling out from under my stone-ageness rocks somewhat yesterday and today in buying my first Flash drives (the USB dongle things) from Newegg yesterday. I am not trolling, rather totally inexperienced with these things.

Newegg had/has a deal on SanDisk Cruzer 16 GB USB 2.0 Flash drives, at $14.99 each. So, I ordered 4(without the bundle).

While they are coming, some questions....

First, they act like virtual CD-R/W or DVD-RAM drives do, right??? OR giant floppy disks, right?? Next, do they have to be formatted to use??? Can they be formatted NTFS if so?? Do they have to be partitioned, or do they act like they have one partition per USB Flash drive/dongle/stick built-in??? The capacity, unlike mechanical HDs, is in true GB, right???

NB: I know I could wait and not embarrass myself and not maybe look like a troll to those who use these things day in and day out, but am always wanting to be forearmed with knowledge rather than screw up backups or recovery stuff only to find out too late it is FUBARed/broken. Any help appreciated....

John.

Comments

  • TushonTushon I'm scared, Coach Alexandria, VA Icrontian
    They act like any USB storage device, typically come with a single partition, can be formatted to anything you want, can be partitioned, NOT true GB (same as HDD).
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    They act like any USB storage device, typically come with a single partition, can be formatted to anything you want, can be partitioned, NOT true GB (same as HDD).
    Thanks. I thought they were the same as SSDs as to GB. Live and learn.... :D

  • QCHQCH Ancient Guru Chicago Area - USA Icrontian
    They can be formatted and even set to "active" and made to be booted from. When I have to install Win7 on customer's computers, I ONLY use the USB install. No spinning drives. Instead of an hour or more, it can be as fast as 20 minutes.
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited December 2011
    I thought they could be made bootable, which implied a partition and boot sector area to my mind. I thought that since folks said they were blazing fast to boot, that they were bootable and fast access.

    I think one of the first things I will do is put Mint on one, Ubuntu and the UBCD utilities on another. I only have my boxes here to play with, the slim ones some folks call laptops... So I do NOT want to try to build dual booting Linux and Win7 on one and lose my recovery partition and Win7 boot.

    The oldest one, a faithful 8-9 year old Lenovo laptop, has Fedora 16 from a DVD install on it right now. I tried a lot of Linuxes on it to get everything working out of box. I could have sped up the experiments had I had these kinds of drives before.

    I think a third will have all the stuff from the recovery partition on my newest laptop on it.

    Thanks for chiming in, good to have stuff confirmed and proven different than I thought before I ruin things accidentally. In my older age, dislike messing stuff up worse accidentally and having more to fix.
  • SnarkasmSnarkasm Madison, WI Icrontian
    If you do it right, you can install all of those on one USB, if that was your desire. UBCD can handle booting many ISOs directly from its menus through some configuration. That's how I have mine set up at the moment.
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    If you do it right, you can install all of those on one USB, if that was your desire. UBCD can handle booting many ISOs directly from its menus through some configuration. That's how I have mine set up at the moment.
    Thanks for the idea, might figure out how to multiconfig after I experience the basics. Never booted a Flash drive before, and never used UBCD to set up a multiboot

  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    Well, it is not multiboot from flash yet, but I have two laptops, each with its own dedicated flash drive, that boot into Mageia 1 plus Cauldron OR Windows without distrurbing the HD boot sector on either (one boot sector on flash drive, one on HD). Just interrupt normal boot with boot menu request key, down arrow to USB (Dell XPS) or USB Sandisk Cruzer (Lenovo W520) and tap enter.

    Mageia behaves well, and Firefox 9.0.1 behaves on both boxes in Mageia (Mageia .rpm in Testing/Cauldron for Firefox 9.0.1). As to too much space (about 15 true GB on nominal 16 GB flash drive), the Linux install in the W520 flash drive is using about 10.7 true GB now.
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