Members Inazone Posted December 8, 2010 Members Share Posted December 8, 2010 I work in an IT department, and one of our big security initiatives over the past couple of years has been to eliminate the use of USB flash drives and hard drives anywhere that it isn't absolutely necessary. Most recently, we've started disabling the option (in BIOS) for PCs to boot from USB devices, as well as any other removable media. I understand that this is to prevent people from getting around security measures, but it got me thinking about using USB flash drives for anything other than data storage. I've started using Reaper at home, and the developer site mentions that the software's "footprint" is so small that it can easily be run from a USB flash drive. I also know of a few people who use flash drives to boot Linux for diagnostic purposes, but not really to run any applications. And of course, Microsoft allows flash drives to be used as virtual memory, at least in Vista. Can't say that I know anyone who actually does that. In any case, is it practical (from a performance perspective) to actually boot a functional Windows install and/or run apps from flash drives? I was under the impression that this would be awfully slow, but I must admit that I'm intrigued by the possibilities, especially with a DAW like Reaper. It takes up so little disk space that, even on a modest 8GB+ flash drive, it leaves plenty of room for essential plug-ins. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Anderton Posted December 8, 2010 Members Share Posted December 8, 2010 When doing live Ableton Live sets with a laptop, I store projects on a USB flash drive and designate all the files as files that should be streamed from "disk." This leaves the computer RAM free for other things because the loops aren't loaded into RAM, and doesn't exercise the internal hard drive because Live thinks the USB stick is a hard drive. Best of all possible worlds! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CMS Author MikeRivers Posted December 8, 2010 CMS Author Share Posted December 8, 2010 When I started playing around with Linux this past Summer, I was running a live version off a USB drive. It was very slow and wouldn't save any configuration changes to the USB drive, but common stuff like Firefox and Open Office ran, as did Audacity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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