Is a 32 gig USB 2.0 Flash drive spacious enough to use as an emergency boot drive?

[testcase]

Actually enough room for several OS X versions.

[freeradical]

I just did a get info of my System folder, and it's 4.9 GB. My Library folder is 11.91 GB. How would a 16 GB drive be enough?

[Buzz]

16GB is ample, but the rub is speed. RAM chips are commodities, and you pay through an orifice for the companies to test 'em and rate 'em for you. Look at some sites that rate flash memory products; you'll see more consistent ratings for the higher priced/higher speed rated products... BUT, you'll also see ratings all over the map for the lower priced/lower speed rated products. You'll see some results for the cheap stuff that meet or beat their higher priced brethren. Why is this? Because you gotta pay the higher price to get 'em pre-tested. A lot of good chips do get into the cheaper products, and perform quite well; the caveat is that you gotta buy 'em and test 'em yourself to find out what you've got. I put dots on 'em w/ a sharpie to rate 'em, the use the speedy ones for important stuff. Also keep in mind that read and write speeds can be vastly different, so you may only need to concern yourself w/ read speed if you're not gonna be writing to it after it's created as desired. You're paying for convenience when you buy the expensive stuff.

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[bazookaman]

freeradical wrote:
I just did a get info of my System folder, and it's 4.9 GB. My Library folder is 11.91 GB. How would a 16 GB drive be enough?

B/c presumably with an emergency disk, your system and library folders won't be bloated with all the everyday stuff you use.

Even my everyday work imac has a library folder clocking in at 8.39gb and a system same as yours. So you must have a lot of extra crap in your library folder.

[Paul F.]

I wasn't quite able to make a 10.6 bootable system fit on an 8gb USB drive, but a 16gb worked great....

Boot... Nuke... Pave (from a network hosted sparseimage)... reboot. Done.

[RAMd®d]

I installed Lion on a 32G USB stick.

Yes, it's a little slow, but not unusable.

Mine is a Kingston drive, and I doubt that speed is it's forte.

[malfunction]

16GB will work - here's the fastest USB drive I've ever had:

http://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Xporter-Sp...pd_sim_e_6

[Jimmypoo]

I don’t know what you guys are doing that you can’t get it onto an 8GB — don’t install Safari and Mail and language/localizations, iTunes, Quicktime, etc., etc.

It’s a repair boot disk. My USB stick gets 14MB/sec on the read. Better than average, but it was still a $12.99
stick from WalMart from back before December.

It boots just about 90 seconds slower than the standard Apple DVD, and WAY faster than if you make the
standard DiskWarrior DVD - which can take as long as 15 minutes to boot up your computer.

I have no idea what it is doing… but I don’t care either. Not when it has 6GB of RAM to play with, and takes
that long.

If I knew where it was, I’d post the screenshot of it. That’s the only bad thing about thumb drives. They
disappear a lot.

[Robert M]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the advice! I'm going to get 2 qty 32 gig models. One to use as an emergency boot drive with a few useful apps. That way, at least I can perform repairs and, if necessary, get some work done in the event time doesn't allow for an immediate repair. The other will be for using older apps that don't run under OS 10.6.x or 10.7.x. The speed of the drive will definitely become a more important factor when I look at them again.

Robert