Best USB Flash Storage?

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday July 30, 2003 @11:35AM from the portable-bootable-and- >3-meg-capacity dept.

Jennifer asks: "I'm thinking of making the plunge and buying some sort of USB flashdisk. I just migrated to a laptop without a floppy, and want some sort of quick and easy medium, preferably bootable, for moving files around. My idea solution would be a SDcard reader that is small, bootable, Hi-Speed USB and sleek/sexy. SD based means I could have a number of cards ready to go, such as a linux card, a Win98 card, maybe even a Win2k card if I could pare the install down to 256MB, plus other stuff, including compatibility with my Palm. Is booting purely BIOS dependent? What have your experiences been with these things?"

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USB Booting by questionlp · 2003-07-30 11:42 · Score: 5, Informative

I believe that booting off of a USB port is BIOS dependent since it needs to be able to not only detect that the USB drive is a storage drive but also have a stack to use it like a hard drive or what-not.

For instance, I am able to boot off of a USB memory key and a USB Zip drive on an IBM ThinkPad X20/X21, but not a T21. I haven't tried it on the A series or any of the newer T series.