USB Drive as Boot Drive - recommendations?
 

I have a handful of machines that I use as little more than NAS or Server type devices. I want to create a fairly "standard" bootable drive on USB for each of them that will allow me to separate the data files and the operating system while also allowing me to more easily do OS upgrades by putting the USB drive into a system with an attached monitor (I run the servers headless).

I've tried some SanDisk Cruzer Fit USB drives (64G) that have worked ok in most systems (one failed), but they run insanely hot. While this is apparently a known issue (likely related to the fact that the drives insert into the machine pretty much "completely"), and is supposedly not something to have concern over, the one that failed may well have been related to the heat issue.

So, I'm looking for some suggestions on this as a couple of my machines are actually XenServer virtualization hosts and a drive failure would be pretty catastrophic for me. So, longevity is absolutely key for me here.

Thanks in advance.

So far I have had good results with a Lexar S75 USB 3.0. It runs cool. However, I notice that it has a 3 1/2 star rating at Amazon, which makes me nervous.

As far as the heating, I have owned two identical Corsair Voyager USB 2.0. One ran hot and the other cool. After a lot of Googling, I found that they were made at two different factories. One of them failed and had to be replaced under warranty.

Even though they all employ solid state circuitry, the circuit design varies. You need to do some Googling to find the design data sheet for a particular model. It will list, among other things, the current drawn by the circuit. The ones that run hot draw a lot of current.

Link?

I don't know of any industrial quality usb drives but there may be some. I'd run a usb mechanical before I trusted a flash drive.

They do make some higher end Windows to Go are made for enterprise level use.

Thanks, but the mechanical drives are SLOW, especially over USB2.0. Given that I'll have to deal with the general bottleneck of the port speed, I don't want to be dragged down any further by slow rotational speeds. Plus, that's extra power consumption, more space, etc. I have some drives that fit that bill, but I'm purposefully looking for flash drives.

I guess at least one supplier claims this quality. https://www.digikey.com/en/product-h...SAAEgLCQ_D_BwE

At $116 for an 8G drive, I'll take, lemme see...... here we go..... None.

"So, longevity is absolutely key for me here."

No free rides. Pay to play usually. Price tends to follow performance.

My money would be better spent on moving up to a more competent machine with an extra internal bay for an SSD.

So, let me change the "longevity is absolutely key" to "longevity is key, but has to be appropriately balanced with cost".

i think you mean SDD drive. your mb may have an external FAST connector for it. mine does if i ever hook it.

they run in Apple then i'm sure they're power conserving right?

XenServer virtualization hosts? who is host and who is guest? first you say booting off then separation. what are youdoing??

i use usb to boot into a linux partition on my win10 "game machine" because i'm old fashioned enough to think grub and win10 will "fight" over the boot media and win10 will win, or win10 will set some mode and make a hd boot wrong

No, I mean SSD.

My needs are to use a USB flash drive to boot the MACHINE. In the case of a XenServer host, that would be the HOST. What are you asking with "what are you doing"? I've already commented on that.

Yes, a bay for the ssd would be a better solution to a flash drive.

Still a sata bay with mechanical may still outshine the ssd for long term use. All this use is documented on SSD daily use claims from OEMs.

I understand my use case to know what I would need from a P/E cycle count, so SSD will absolutely work so long as I don't buy the junk drives with low cycle counts. Any reasonable flash drive will work, too. With either, I need to be able to estimate when the drive is likely to start failing so that I can pop it out and copy it to a new drive and boot the machine back up.

One of the reasons that I want to use flash drives - they can be extremely inexpensive, and I can manage the backups and such and restore them "on a moment's notice" from another machine. They're also significantly easier to install/remove because they are external to the chassis. Mechanical drives may very well hold up better over time, but I am also trying to keep power consumption levels down. So, my mechanical drives are all programmed to spin down when not in use - that isn't practical for an OS drive because something is almost always writing to a log file.