isostick

If anyone is in IT for a living (like me), you'll probably find the isostick to be an incredible time-saver. It's a USB drive that uses microSD and presents as both a USB stick and a USB CD drive. The BIOS lets you boot off an .ISO as if it were a true CD-ROM, so no more messing around with boot loaders and whatnot to boot various OSes for installation (or things like UBCD, RIPLinux, etc).

I've had one for a while (since the Kickstarter run) and it's great. Firmware upgradable for new features, has a read/write lock switch, takes a 64GB microSD so it can be used for data as well as ISOs.

They are back in stock at Amazon right now -- no idea how many. I hadn't posted about them until now because they were sold out for a while.

Check it out here:http://isostick.com/

Here's the Kickstarter page, for anyone interested in how it all went down:http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...in-a-usb-stick

If it doesn't support USB booting, it won't boot isostick either. It being USB and all, you know.

One of the issues I always had with YUMI was the coexistence of multiple Windows install ISOs on one stick. It used to decompress some of the install files to the root of the USB stick, so you could only have one version of Windows (XP or higher) on the stick at any time. Does it still do this?

Cool. They must have gotten past whatever limitation was there.

It's still a good piece of kit to have around. Lets you mount the ISOs in any OS as well without installing software to do it (i.e. on a client's computer, you're not going to install Daemon Tools or whatever to do your work).

The USB2 part does kinda suck. It doesn't bother me, though. I don't use it for much day to day, mostly OS installs.

Edit: I should add that I carry around a great deal of stuff to do my work -- pretty much half of Technet -- so this might make a lot more sense for someone in my position than the average person. Not having to ever carry around a few dozen DVDs again is very helpful, not to mention that if I run out of space, it's as easy as buying another microSD, which is a hell of a lot smaller than a DVD binder or whatever.

Yep. If you don't do this kind of thing for a living, it's expensive for something that amounts to convenience. If you do IT for a living and can expense it (or get a client to buy it for you, or get it through work, or...) it's a great addition to any kit.