Cluttermagnet Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 (edited) Hi, all- I'm in learning mode again. Not too much experience here with SSD's or booting from USB flash drives, etc. I have a couple of questions. In addition, there are probably a couple more questions I don't yet know that I need to ask. But here are a few: (1.) How does a USB2 flash drive perform as bootable media? I know everybody is using USB3 which is way faster. Is USB2 just too slow to bother with? I have a couple of USB3 drives, 32GB, but there are few (or no) USB3 sockets on any of my towers. Nor on my older Lenovo R61 laptop. I know you can use a small PCI-e socket and run a USB3 card on it, then bring the connection out of the tower with a jack for a 'thumb drive'. (2.) I see a bunch of 'naked' SSD cards floating around on Ebay and Amazon, etc. Looks like they were really designed for laptops. OTOH they do have the 'mSATA' connector, some of them. Assuming I were to take one of these naked drives and either insulate it or sock it down using the two screw holes on the little card, does this beast perform identically to a 'normal' 2.5 inch SSD? Just hook it up with the normal SATA signal and power cables and it works? (3.) There is some other flavor of naked SSD card floating around. I haven't figured out what they are yet. Look like they may plug directly in a small (1x?) PCI-e connector on the mobo? Can my towers recognize a solid state hard drive that is plugged into a PCI-e slot as a hard drive? Anyway, the difference is obvious from the mSATA cards because there are two slots and three tails at the card edge, whereas the mSATA have one slot, two tails, just like the usual SATA devices do. Thanks, Clutter Edited December 10, 2014 by Cluttermagnet Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amenditman Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 1. Performance is OK on USB 2 with full Linux distros, lightweight distros run very well. 2. mSata is not the same as a normal SATA set up internal drive. 3. PCIe SSDs are generally the fastest and most expensive. As to whether they will be recognized, depends on your BIOS I think. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 Hi, all- I'm in learning mode again. Not too much experience here with SSD's or booting from USB flash drives, etc. I have a couple of questions. In addition, there are probably a couple more questions I don't yet know that I need to ask. But here are a few: (1.) How does a USB2 flash drive perform as bootable media? I know everybody is using USB3 which is way faster. Is USB2 just too slow to bother with? I have a couple of USB3 drives, 32GB, but there are few (or no) USB3 sockets on any of my towers. Nor on my older Lenovo R61 laptop. I know you can use a small PCI-e socket and run a USB3 card on it, then bring the connection out of the tower with a jack for a 'thumb drive'. I do not have a usb 3.0 flashdrive and all of my usb 2.0 drives are more than efficient when booting live distros. Most livecds/usb use your ram moreso than the media. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amenditman Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 I run both Live distros and actual installs from USB 2 sticks. Even full installs are not terrible, not super fast, but not terrible either. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 USB 3 is backwards compatible so you can plug a stick in any usb port and it will work. Buying a secondhand ssd is a fools errand. Depending on what you need a ssd for even one of the older tech ssd's would give you a very measurable boost to any pc. http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Storage/cat/Hard-Drive---SSD?sort=price+ascending For instance this drive will make your pc fly. The 120 GB version is only £40. Kingston 60GB SSDNow V300 I put a slower ssd than that in my sisters 754 mobo pc and Windows 7 flys along like a rocket. Here is a good place to get some in depth information about ssd's, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive This was a neat tit bit I found there, Battery or super capacitor Another component in higher performing SSDs is a capacitor or some form of battery. These are necessary to maintain data integrity such that the data in the cache can be flushed to the drive when power is dropped; some may even hold power long enough to maintain data in the cache until power is resumed.[65] In the case of MLC flash memory, a problem called lower page corruption can occur when MLC flash memory loses power while programming an upper page. The result is that data written previously and presumed safe can be corrupted if the memory is not supported by a super capacitor in the event of a sudden power loss. This problem does not exist with SLC flash memory.[41] Most consumer-class SSDs do not have built-in batteries or capacitors;[66] among the exceptions are the Crucial M500 and MX100 series,[67] the Intel 320 series,[68] and the more expensive Intel 710, 730[69] and DC S3700 series.[70] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amenditman Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 It is really hard to go wrong with the Crucial M500/M550 series. Great price, performance, 7mm form factor fits almost everything, and now I find out it is one of the few with a battery built in. I have had great service from several M500 SSD's. Never any problems, but even if I did have a problem, Crucial has fantastic warranty support. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 I paid $89 for my Samsung EVO 840 120gb SSD and it is one of the fastest available on the market with 540Mbps read and write. The specs says 410Mbps write but I am getting a write speed that are equal to my read speed. More info on this thread: http://forums.scotsn...showtopic=70341 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 Do not get a PCIe SSD as a boot drive. They need to load a driver which obviously can not be loaded before the OS starts. I have heard of people using another separate small SSD for boot when using these. Tom's Hardware has regular SSD comparison tests. Samsung usually shows up well in these but there are a few consistently good brands. My old OCZ Vertex2 has served me well, and OCZ are now owned by Toshiba so are pretty reliable. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lewmur Posted December 11, 2014 Share Posted December 11, 2014 No mobo using a BIOS will boot from a USB 3 or eSata port. A USB 3 stick will boot from a USB 2 port but not at USB 3 speed. Personally I run Linux and don't reboot often enough to make the boot time significant but if it were, quick check on eBay finds a 30gb Sata III drive for $32 including shipping. A 120gb can be had for $60. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted December 11, 2014 Share Posted December 11, 2014 No mobo using a BIOS will boot from a USB 3 or eSata port. A USB 3 stick will boot from a USB 2 port but not at USB 3 speed. http://www.wyae.de/docs/boot-usb3/ You finally have acquired a shiny new USB3 stick - and Linux is mulishly refusing to boot from it - until you start it in a (slower) USB2 port. This usually is caused by the lack of USB3 (XHCI) drivsers in the Linux' INITRD. You first have to configure a USB3-enabled XINITRD Apparently you can. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lewmur Posted December 12, 2014 Share Posted December 12, 2014 (edited) http://www.wyae.de/docs/boot-usb3/ Apparently you can. To do this, you have to have grub and the Linux kernel installed on another drive that the BIOS can point to. And it doesn't work at all to boot Windows. If you are booting Linux you could also boot from that other drive and then switch to the USB 3 drive. Either way you have to load at least part of the kernel from the other drive in order to have the USB 3 driver loaded. You can't just carry a USB 3 stick around and boot it from any computer with a USB 3 port the way you could with most USB 2 sticks. Edited December 12, 2014 by lewmur Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amenditman Posted December 12, 2014 Share Posted December 12, 2014 I have had issues booting from USB 3 on UEFI.. UEFI mobo with back and front panel USB 3 connected. Only boot from back panel. Front panel are not seen by the UEFI as bootable devices. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cluttermagnet Posted December 12, 2014 Author Share Posted December 12, 2014 Wow- this has been a great discussion, guys. I'm learning, albeit slowly... Hmmm, am I hearing that I should have bought the slower USB2 sticks to use as bootable media? Alas, I chose a couple of 32GB USB3. Most everything I am running has a BIOS. Probably just as true of my Lenovo R61 lappy, which is about 5 year old tech. But getting back to the flash cards, how about booting to an SD card plugged into the front of my R61? Is that going to fly (with BIOS)? I need to go through that BIOS again and pay closer attention to the several choices of bootable media I remember seeing. BTW what I have bought so far is Corsair. I have no idea which of the 'big four' makers the Corsair is based on. I now have two of them- a 60G and also a 120G (on the way). Dang! NewEgg had Crucial 120G on sale for about 60 bucks recently- but I had already gone for the cheaper Corsairs... I saw the Samsung 840 as being like a Cadillac but a little out of my comfort range, Josh. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goretsky Posted December 12, 2014 Share Posted December 12, 2014 Hello, I have used USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 flash drives to boot from things like Parted Magic and install Windows. Slightly better boot speeds for Parted Magic with USB 3.0, but Windows installs were noticeably faster for Windows 8/10 Technical Preview. The ThinkPad R61 has one CardBus (nee 32-bit PCMCIA) slot, along with one slot below it that may contain an ExpressCard/54 slot, a SmartCard reader (the badge kind, not the old memory card kind from the 1990s) or a 4-in-1 Memory Card reader (SD Card, MMC, SONY Memory Sick, Olympus xD Picture Card). Neither the ThinkPad T60/R60 or T61/R61 will boot from a SD Card in the 4-in-1 Memory Card Reader slot, although it may boot from a memory card in an external USB card reader. The ExpressCard/54 slot will hold the slimmer ExpressCard/34 cards as well, by the way. There will just be a 20mm gap the card doesn't fill up. You can add USB 3.0, eSATA, FireWire-800 cards via the ExpressCard slot, but it's kind of up in the air as to whether those will be bootable. I have had a few Lexar and Wintec ExpressCard form-factor SSDs, and some would boot, others would not. The R61 contains either two or three MiniPCIe slots, but none of them are compatible with the mSATA standard, which was still in development while they were being developed. Although mSATA cards physically fit, the R61's MiniPCIe slots don't do SATA signalling, so they won't be recognized. Your best bet for going solid-state is likely to be a 2.5" SSD, which will pretty much look like a 2.5" HDD except there's not circuit board exposed--it's all inside the plastic (or metal) shell. Linux and Windows install to one of those exactly as they do to a HDD, although Windows disables some un-needed services and changes the settings on some others since an SSD behaves a little differently than rotating media on the inside. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted December 12, 2014 Share Posted December 12, 2014 To do this, you have to have grub and the Linux kernel installed on another drive that the BIOS can point to. And it doesn't work at all to boot Windows. If you are booting Linux you could also boot from that other drive and then switch to the USB 3 drive. Either way you have to load at least part of the kernel from the other drive in order to have the USB 3 driver loaded. You can't just carry a USB 3 stick around and boot it from any computer with a USB 3 port the way you could with most USB 2 sticks. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/booting-usb-hard-drive-on-uefi-machine-in-legacy-mode-4175525891/ The question should have been Booting USB hard drive on a machine with USB3 ports whereas before always booted on machines with solely USB2 ports! When running mkinitrd_command_generator.sh on my USB2 machine I got Code: mkinitrd -c -k 3.10.17-smp -f ext4 -r /dev/sdb1 -m usb-storage:ehci-hcd:ehci-pci:uhci-hcd:mbcache:jbd2:ext4 -u -o /boot/initrd.gz whereas on USB3 machine got Code: mkinitrd -c -k 3.10.17-smp -f ext4 -r /dev/sdb1 -m usb-storage:xhci-hcd:mbcache:jbd2:ext4 -u -o /boot/initrd.gz So in mkinitrd just combined the two sets of modules, took out the mbcache:jbd2:ext4 and added the wait parameter and ran it Code: mkinitrd -c -k 3.10.17-smp -f ext4 -r /dev/sdb1 -m usb-storage:xhci-hcd:ehci-hcd:ehci-pci:uhci-hcd -u -w 10 -o /boot/initrd.gz Booted up on the USB3 machine - success. Booted on the USB2 machine success. Something to remember if we ever see machines with USB4 Thanks Didier for your patience. I leave out mbcache:jbd2:ext4 because it causes me problems, on boot, if it's included but not if it's not. Alex Well apparently Slackware can boot from a USB3 or a USB2 port with a USB3 stick. So if it is possible with Slackware it should be possible with any linux. You do have to make some changes as in my first post or as in this post but it looks like it is possible. As to Windows I have no idea and no inclination to investigate. I just re-read the Slackware posting and it does not mention what usb stick is used, however I have an idea that it is the ports not the stick that are causing the problems.I could be wrong of course. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lewmur Posted December 12, 2014 Share Posted December 12, 2014 (edited) http://www.linuxques...ode-4175525891/ Well apparently Slackware can boot from a USB3 or a USB2 port with a USB3 stick. So if it is possible with Slackware it should be possible with any linux. You do have to make some changes as in my first post or as in this post but it looks like it is possible. As to Windows I have no idea and no inclination to investigate. I just re-read the Slackware posting and it does not mention what usb stick is used, however I have an idea that it is the ports not the stick that are causing the problems.I could be wrong of course. The problem is that USB 3 requires more code than will fit in a standard BIOS to access it. Therefore code MUST be loaded from another drive before the USB 3 port can be read. Linux allows for partial loading of system files from one drive and then switching to another. Window doesn't. But even in Linux you are not actually fully booting from the USB 3 device. The BIOS points to a drive other than the USB 3 drive to load the bootloader and at least the driver portion of the kernel. Edited December 12, 2014 by lewmur 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cluttermagnet Posted December 12, 2014 Author Share Posted December 12, 2014 (edited) OK, well all the other methods pale in comparison to simply popping in an SSD. That's what I'm going to do initially. It's going to be a Corsair 120GB 2.5in drive because that's what was cheap and available 'on special' at the time of need. Should be in the mail today or tomorrow, I reckon... Aside from that, it is easy to experiment with the 32 GB USB3 flash drives I have. I'll try them various ways on various machines including the laptop. I have yet to make my first Linux install on a flash drive, but that will be 'soon' now. That's an interesting idea about the external USB card reader, Aryeh. I think I'll play with that method as well. I do have several kicking around here, new and used. Weeks of contented fiddling ahead for me- and I have so many projects queued or envisioned I should never run out. P.S. Still not clear on one point- is it likely a USB 3 drive would just entirely not work, then? I thought they were all backwards compatible. Wouldn't a USB3 drive just revert to the USB2 standard? That's what all the sales literature almost always claims. Let's be clear, though- I am talking about when used as a bootable drive, as opposed to just bulk memory on a USB port... Edited December 12, 2014 by Cluttermagnet Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burninbush Posted December 12, 2014 Share Posted December 12, 2014 (edited) Hi, all- I'm in learning mode again. Not too much experience here with SSD's or booting from USB flash drives, etc. I have a couple of questions. In addition, there are probably a couple more questions I don't yet know that I need to ask. But here are a few: (1.) How does a USB2 flash drive perform as bootable media? I know everybody is using USB3 which is way faster. Is USB2 just too slow to bother with? I have a couple of USB3 drives, 32GB, but there are few (or no) USB3 sockets on any of my towers. Nor on my older Lenovo R61 laptop. I know you can use a small PCI-e socket and run a USB3 card on it, then bring the connection out of the tower with a jack for a 'thumb drive'. (2.) I see a bunch of 'naked' SSD cards floating around on Ebay and Amazon, etc. Looks like they were really designed for laptops. OTOH they do have the 'mSATA' connector, some of them. Assuming I were to take one of these naked drives and either insulate it or sock it down using the two screw holes on the little card, does this beast perform identically to a 'normal' 2.5 inch SSD? Just hook it up with the normal SATA signal and power cables and it works? (3.) There is some other flavor of naked SSD card floating around. I haven't figured out what they are yet. Look like they may plug directly in a small (1x?) PCI-e connector on the mobo? Can my towers recognize a solid state hard drive that is plugged into a PCI-e slot as a hard drive? Anyway, the difference is obvious from the mSATA cards because there are two slots and three tails at the card edge, whereas the mSATA have one slot, two tails, just like the usual SATA devices do. Thanks, Clutter Hi, Clutter ... I went through this a few months back, and can offer some suggestions from experience. -- a sata2 ssd drive (64gb Vertex) boots fine off the mobo sata ports on a 6 year-old mobo here. Does ~200mb /second data transfers and is generally 2x as fast at everything as the sata hard disk it replaced. Obviously, it only speeds up the portion of booting during which the disk light is on -- but some of booting time has the kernel doing hardware searches and inits, doesn't help with that, so you can't expect boots to be 2x as fast with a 2x faster drive. It's faster than my best hard disk. -- regarding pcie sockets, booting from a pcie card doesn't work unless your bios already offers that as a choice. Even recent mobos here don't offer that choice, so you'll have to get the puter booted with something else, after which (usb3, sata 6gb) will work fine, except for booting. I saw amazing fast xfer speed from a usb3.0 stick plugged into a pcie card, >140mb/second. -- as noted above, when running linux you can load vmlinuz and initrd from a bootable port, which gets the fast drivers running, after which you can then boot the rest of the system from the pcie card. This offers a practical boost when running linux -- those two files are often only like 5 - 6 mb size, and will load quickly from [for example] a usb2.0 stick or conventional hard drive. Edited December 12, 2014 by burninbush Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amenditman Posted December 13, 2014 Share Posted December 13, 2014 P.S. Still not clear on one point- is it likely a USB 3 drive would just entirely not work, then? I thought they were all backwards compatible. Wouldn't a USB3 drive just revert to the USB2 standard? That's what all the sales literature almost always claims. Let's be clear, though- I am talking about when used as a bootable drive, as opposed to just bulk memory on a USB port... That is not 100% true in my experience. Backwards compatibility and the stick is useable on any USB 2 slot, but not always as a boot drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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Cluttermagnet Posted December 13, 2014 Author Share Posted December 13, 2014 Ya know what- USB drives have gotten terrifically cheap lately, Especially the USB2 types. I can get myself one of those for ten bucks or less at 32GB. So maybe I'll be looking out for the next special deal and scarf one up. BTW I have been thinking about those 1x pci-e to SATA3 adaptors (cards). That ought to work on some of my newer hardware that runs pci-e video cards. You can also buy an internal extension cable and bring it out on the front panel with a 3.5in floppy drive size insert (panel). I was researching that angle a few weeks ago... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burninbush Posted December 14, 2014 Share Posted December 14, 2014 Ya know what- USB drives have gotten terrifically cheap lately, Especially the USB2 types. I can get myself one of those for ten bucks or less at 32GB. So maybe I'll be looking out for the next special deal and scarf one up. BTW I have been thinking about those 1x pci-e to SATA3 adaptors (cards). That ought to work on some of my newer hardware that runs pci-e video cards. You can also buy an internal extension cable and bring it out on the front panel with a 3.5in floppy drive size insert (panel). I was researching that angle a few weeks ago... Same problem as with the USB 3, you won't be able to boot from it, or use it at all until some other OS adds a driver for sata3. I'm shopping here for a new mobo to solve this, hoping to use my existing cpu and memory. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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