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Writer's pictureTony Fortunato

Drive Testing and Ventoy

Have you ever started doing something and it branches off to something else?


Well, here is a great example of that exact scenario.  I wanted to show you a cool piece of software called Ventoy (www.ventoy.net). From the website:

“Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.

With ventoy, you don't need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly.

You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them (screenshot).

You can also browse ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files in local disks and boot them.”


This is pretty cool because there are certain things you cant do from a VM. In those scenarios, the operating system needs to see the actual hardware.

But before I can put Ventoy or an ISO image on a drive, I should find out which of my USB drives would be the best candidate. Of course I have a drawer with a bunch of USB drives, so lets find out.


I used CrysatlMarkDrive (https://sourceforge.net/projects/crystaldiskmark/) to test the drives out.


I labelled the drives, Blue, Black and Purple to make things easy.

Spoiler alert Black outperformed the other two drives. Now I install Ventoy on the USB drive, simply drag the ISO’s to the drive, and tada, done.


I can see this being a pretty helpful in field.  The only challenges I can think of is if the computer has a power on password, cant boot from USB or compatibility issues with some computers booting from a usb drive larger than 128 GB.



 


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