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I just use an enclosure that emulates a dvd-drive. Put a cheap SATA ssd in there and you can stop worrying about incompatibilities.
by alphager 1y ago
I just use an enclosure that emulates a dvd-drive. Put a cheap SATA ssd in there and you can stop worrying about incompatibilities.
- metadat 1y agoHow do you image the SSD? Isn't it kind of the same issue as with imaging a USB stick?
- doubled112 1y agoYou don't image it. You drag and drop ISOs into a directory on the SSD, and the USB device emulates a DVD ROM drive with the contents. You choose the ISO through a small screen and button on the device.
- beagle3 1y agoCan you give the model name of the one you use?
- green-salt 1y agonot the OP but I use the IODD ST400 for this purpose and wish I had gotten something like this long ago
- sigio 1y agoCan confirm, also have 2 IODD devices for this purpose, though I usually grab my (simplest) USB stick that has netboot.xyz flashed to it, and just boot off that, and select whatever netboot image I want and have it get everything from the interwebs. No need to ever update this workflow.
- doubled112 1y agoWill netboot.xyz boot from a WiFi connection? I've always assumed no, and most of my machines do not have Ethernet jacks anymore.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoWay too many unnecessary features and too expensive. The 2531 is perfect. I've had this since about 2014.
- nulld3v 1y agoI think both of them have been at the same price for at least 2 years now.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoAll things being equal, simple and proven is better than over-complicated and extraneous.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoWith the iODD 2531: It has modes: CD, HDD, and dual. CD provides emulation only. HDD and dual expose an FAT32 drive volume that can contains a magic _ISO directory to store .iso's. One limitation though is it doesn't support fragmented (discontinuous) files, and so those need to be minimally defragmented occasionally.
- winkelmann 1y agoIt also has an issue with remembering the last mounted .iso if its filename is beyond a certain length, in which case it will instead load a random (although always the same) .iso in the same folder. I mainly had this issue with the default Windows install image names. Fragmentation can be a bit annoying, especially when using exFAT, which doesn't appear to have defragmentation tools available. It can be avoided by never deleting files and instead reformatting every so often. That being said, it's still a fantastic tool because all the images "just work" everywhere a class-compliant USB optical drive would.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoNo sense using exFAT because it's not as widely-supported. Don't have to reformat fat32 because File Allocation Tables are extremely simple. Move all files off, and then move them back serially, and presto, no more fragmentation.
- winkelmann 1y agoFAT32 is not an option because Windows images these days are all over 4GiB. exFAT is very widely supported; the alternative would be NTFS, which doesn't work well (no write support) on macOS.
- burnt-resistor 1y ago> exFAT is very widely supported; Except it's not by all of the things I need to use, so that's not going to work. Compatibility vs. 4 GiB limit. There is no perfect, only trade-offs.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoiODD 2531 is the cheapest and simplest such example.
- m463 1y agodoesn't it have firmware? :)