USB flash drive and memeory sticks - are they the same ?

Sorry - a bit of a basic question....

1. Is a USB flash drive the same as a USB memory stick ? If not how does it differ because they look the same on a goggle image search ?

and one more .....

2. In terms of following instructions to prepare for the installation of a third party OS on AAO which requires a USB flash drive & possibly bootable too, (eg. TinyXP, iAtkos os x ) is there anything specific about the USB flash drive i should get to undertake this process or are all USB flash drives pretty much the same ? (I know that 3rd party software formats the USB stick - so this is strictly a hardware question.)


thanks for your attention.

n

 

There are brand to brand performance differences, but as far as I am aware both an SDHC card and a USB thumb drive are capable of being bootable devices. Use unetbootin to make a flash memory device bootable: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

I created an installer USB for Ubuntu on a 4gb USB thumb drive, and installed on both an 8gb SDHC card and an 8gb USB thumb drive before paritioning my HDD between Windows XP and Ubuntu. Holding down the F12 during the AA1 boot sequence should allow you to choose which device to boot from. I have seen a recommendation to choose ext2 rather than ext3 (journalled) when installing Linux on a solid state memory device for both speed (ext2 should be faster) and to reduce the number of writes to the device that are added by ext3.

I have two 8 gb USB thumb drives (Corsair and Kingston), and using the aa1backup utility, I have measured data transfer differences of about 30% during backup/restore tasks. For an SDHC card, look for "Class 6" memory, which is the fastest.

 

Just remember that on the A110 and A150 you can not boot from the internal SD card readers. On the later D and H models (10" and up screensize) you can boot from an SD card in the internal cardreaders.

 

Hi
I'm a AAO ZG5 SSD / (LH - left hand) SD 16GB.

1. Could i boot off an SD card with the AAO ZG5 do you know ?
2. Can i always boot off a (format-ready) USB flash stick regardless of AAO model type ?
3. In theory, could i put a bootable self contained Mac OS X iatkos on one USB flash stick, a bootable self contained Ron's TinyXP on another USB flash stick and keep the linpus linux on my SSD / (LH) SD card internal drives ; thereby giving me access to three operating systems for my AAO ?


n

 

ZG5 = AAO A110 and AAO A150 models, so to answer your questions :

1) No.****
2) Yes.
3) Yes. Just use the Bios F12 boot menu to select whether you want to boot from the internal SSD, or one of the USB sticks.

**** You can sorta boot from a SD card, IF you place the bootloader and initial bootfiles (initrd etc for Linux) on the SSD or on an USB stick, so the necessary support for the cardreaders are loaded, to read the rest of the OS from a SD or SDHC card in one of the cardreaders.

 

Thanks for the qualification -- I should have mentioned that my SDHC/USB experience was with a D150. So, it's not possible to boot an earlier model from the right-hand card reader slot either? Too bad.

I'm impressed with how much Acer improved the overall design of the 2nd generation AA1, while maintaining the basic package. It seems like they listened to reviewers and users and overcame most of the faults of the original design (flaky trackpad, inaccessible innards, smallish screen, short battery time).

 

other deeper Qs....
If i boot off a self contained windows / MAc OS system on a USB stick as a matter of habit - (remembering i have Linpus Linux installed internally on the ZG5.).........

Concerning how that boot-up configeration is treating my internal 8GB SSD :-
1. Is the SSD being detected as an accessable seperate partition or as part of the over all USB stick derived OS drive ?
2. Will it read / write to any spare GB space on the SSD & what drive gets priotised when reading and writing ?
3. Is there a recommended OS work flow i can configure i.e. keeping my documents written to the internal SSD but the apps and OS on the USB stick OS ?

Concerning how that boot-up configeration is treating my (LH) 8GB SD card that came with the ZG5 :-
1. Is it being detected as an accessable partition, as part of the over all USB stick OS or as a mounted expansion slot ?
2. Will it read / write to any spare GB space on the SD card in the same way the internal Linpus Linux is configured to or will it strictly treat it as a mounted expansion slot and utilize spare Gb only when i myself make use of it ?

many thanx n

 

1) The SSD will be detected by MacOS and XP as a seperate drive - Accessability will solely depend on whether MacOS and XP has filesystem drivers for the ext2 filesystem used by your Linpus installation. AFAIR neither of those OS has that out of the box, but there are both commercial and opensource drivers for ext2 filesystems available.

2) No as per answer 1.

3) Best bet would be to use a FAT32 formatted SD card in the left hand cardreader to store your documents on, that you want accessable from all your OS's. The default Linpus installation on the SSD will automatically use that SD card as an extension to your /home directory. MacOS and XP should be able to see the SD card as removable storage and since both XP and MacOS has support for the FAT32 filesystem you should be able to read and write files on the card.