Little and Large · May 13, 12:46 PM
Gadget lovers can get a fix of gadgety goodness from USB flash drives that have shrunk smaller and smaller whilst growing in capacity. Recently they have fallen in price drastically too. Here I look at two of the smaller ones.
Both these drives cost less than £10 and store more than a CD. They are also small enough to fit on a keyring. Being towards the top end of the market they come with lanyards, loops, rings and so on to help you not to lose them. They are practically geek jewellery. These are both 1Gb but the Crucial drive is available in capacities up to 4Gb – that’s almost as big as a DVD.
Mouse over the small images to see them full size
As you can see, the Crucial drive is quite a bit smaller than the already tiny OCZ one. The only other notable difference is that the OCZ drive has a little blue light that flashes when it’s being accessed.
One of the cool things you can do with these drives is to use them to boot a PC from. If you are a Fedora user then you could use the new-ish livecd-tools package to install a bootable CD image onto the USB device. The command to use is:
yum -y install livecd-tools
livecd-iso-to-disk bootable-image.iso /dev/sdb1
Be sure to replace the /dev/sdb1 with the correct device and partition for your USB drive. This process will leave the formatting of the USB drive alone and any files on there will not be affected. Finally, make sure your PC / laptop is configured to look at USB drives as bootable (do this from the BIOS settings when you reboot).
Reboot and you should notice that the USB drive is working just as well as a bootable CDROM, although it might be quite a bit faster and more responsive. This is something that is being actively developed so expect to see more sophisticated features for use of USB flash drives in the future (basically, persistence of settings changed in the live image).
For other bootable images, check out the excellent RIP tools bootable CD