Bottom-rung USB Flash stick

Today I purchased a Verbatim STORE N GO 16GB USB2 Flash stick, at AU$4.25, from Officeworks.

I just wanted something cheap. I write different builds of EasyOS onto Flash sticks, each labeled with masking tape, and keep various older ones. Consequently, sometimes run out of a spare one to write to.

Anyway, thought that I would post this as a warning to others: recommend buy a more up-market Flash stick for testing EasyOS!!!!

I used the 'easydd' utility to write the EasyOS 0.9.18 image file to the Flash stick, and it recorded a write speed of 3.9MB/sec.

This is down at the absolute bottom. I did get around that figure with an Emtec stick. My experience is, cheap Verbatim and Emtec Flash sticks from BigW, Officeworks, etc., are not just low-cost, they are also extremely slow.

At the other extreme, is an SSD at about 150MB/sec write speed, see test here:

http://bkhome.org/news/201812/thoughts-on-hdd-and-ssd-speed.html

If you want a fast USB Flash stick, the best that I have purchased is a Sandisk Extreme, giving around 100MB/sec. But you don't have to go that far. Pay a few more dollars than AU$4 and you can easily get around 7 - 20 MB/sec. A cheap USB3 stick will usually give faster performance than a USB2 stick.

Anyway, after writing 0.9.18 to the verbatim STORE N GO, booted it. It was not a pleasant experience. A lot of waiting is required.

The most alarming event was after clicking the "www" icon on the desktop, a "starting for the first time" window popped up, and then disappeared, and then.... nothing. waited and waited. Began to think that I had done something wrong with this build, then suddenly SeaMonkey window appeared.

Using it now. Once underway, it is working OK.

This post is a warning. Do not test running Easy, or any Linux, using the cheapest Flash stick in your collection. Use the best one. 

EDIT 2019-01-14

Oh man, it gets worse. This Flash stick is only a few days old. I installed Easy 0.9.18 on it, have booted a few times. This morning, started to boot it, and got an error:

Copying EasyOS to RAM, then mounting
cp: read error: I/O error

Only 4 bucks, won't take it back, just throw it in the trash bin. 

Tags: tech