On Friday 11 January 2008, Anthony E. Caudel wrote: > 2nd question: I must be dense on this one so someone help me out. > Since a USB stick is seen as a hard drive, why can't I do a standard > install to it? Is it because until lately they haven't been large > enough? I'm thinking of using an 8GB one.
There's a few reasons: 1. The memory used on those devices has a limited life - about 100,000 writes for the good ones and maybe 10,000 for the bad ones. With a standard install, frequent writes are the norm (think cache and other similar things). This usually ends up at the same spot on the disk, meaning your new install will last about a month if you are lucky. There are ways around this, for instance how a LiveCD does things. 2. Booting off it is a pain. You need drivers for the entire USB stack at boot time, which usually means a ginormous initrd. 3. Size, which you mentioned -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
