Walter Jessen

I’m using Linux more and more frequently for bioinformatics/computational biology. Lately, I’ve been interested in Linux distributions that are specially designed to work from flash devices. Having a full, lightweight operating system with desktop, applications, email, files and personal settings on a USB flash drive can be incredibly useful and convenient.

There are several Live USB system creators that allow you to create a bootable Live USB key with a Linux on it. In particular, UNetbootin looks quite useful, as it installs Ubuntu, Fedora and several other Linux distributions to run on both Windows and Linux. Over the years, I’ve had experience with Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo, so I’ll likely evaluate those distributions.

Presently, it looks like OCZ has some of the fastest USB 2.0 dual channel flash drives on the market: the OCZ Rally2 Turbo and OCZ ATV. Kristofer over at Testfreaks also recommends the OCZ Throttle, the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX and the Patriot Xporter XT Boost. Additionally, although read/write performance is nowhere near as fast, I also like the 16GB LaCie WhizKey.

Which do I choose: form or function?

And why stop with a flash drive? They only achieve read rates as high as 35 MB/s and write rates as high as 30 MB/s. I’ve had my eye on a G-Technology G-DRIVE Mini High Speed Portable Drive. I’ve used one of the smaller 5400 rpm drives to backup my MacBook (using TimeMachine) and it’s worked flawlessly. I’d love to benchmark one of the G-DRIVE Mini 7200 rpm drives to see if it gets closer to the theoretical maximum USB 2.0 data rate of 60 MB/s and evaluate how Linux Live USB performs.

Whether it be USB flash or high speed portable drive, I’m looking forward to making Linux portable.