Comments on: IsoStick turns a flash stick into an optical drive

By: Stuart

Stuart — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:08:10 +0000

UMAZone and IO-Data are two companies that do something similar but with an HD-Drive so you can store lots more ISOs. It seems funny that such a device hasn’t been made already since it’s something that could have helped IT departments for years.

By: Steven

Steven — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 02:49:30 +0000

@Luscious – Unfortunately, not every ISO, on the other hand, is keen on being on anything other than their intended optical media. Be that a computer game or an OS. Either by design, or by limitation. In addition, while booting from USB is supported by most BIOSes these days, you’ll still want something bootable on there, where this will have a nice bootloader to pick any of the ISOs on the storage medium. Lastly, it has a read-only switch, in those cases where you want to poke at (an infected) computer and don’t want things writing to the drive, while not needing to install a driver first. I agree that it’s a niche market, as there’s tutorials available online that allow you to get to 95% of what the IsoStick does, and that will be just fine for most people. But getting to that last 5% is why I’d back this.

By: Luscious

Luscious — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 00:38:56 +0000

I’m not sure what the point is in making a USB stick emulate a CD ROM drive – every notebook BIOS I’ve looked at lets you set USB in the boot-order list, even netbooks without a built-in burner. If your system goes down because your hard drive’s heads have crashed, your system won’t be able to be rescued PERIOD.

It’s fairly easy nowadays to create a full-system backup and keep it on a bootable USB flash drive. Short of any physical damage, you’ll be fine for most emergencies.