Booting Windows from an SD CARD???
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,044 words · ~10 min read
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now back in the days of serial ata gen 2. when we were booting dinosaur
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operating systems like Windows 7 a typical high performance SSD would be
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rated somewhere in the neighborhood of around 230 to 250 megabytes a second for
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reads and writes which got me thinking when sony released
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sd cards that are rated up to
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300 megabytes a second okay technically 299 on the rights could we boot Windows
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from these and what would the experience be like
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ifixit's protech toolkit gives you the tools you need to tackle any electronics
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repair challenge visit ifixit.com Linus at the link below and get yours today so
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these puppies have actually been out for quite a while but it took sony almost a
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year to send them to us because apparently
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uh they and along with anything else made of nand flash memory have been in
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very very short supply so what's special about them is not really the capacity i
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mean 128 gigs should be noted is
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pretty decent for an SSD from you know
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back when these kinds of speeds would have been reasonable
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but it's not that it's that because these are sdxc2 so these are uh s2 cards
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and high-end ones at that you've actually got additional contact pins on
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the back of them that enable these extra speeds now what that means is that while
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they are backwards compatible with devices and with card readers that are
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only sdxc capable to get the most out of it we are
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going to need a special reader so this is the uh the wow that's a terrible
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product name i mean i guess it's descriptive this is the sony uhs2 compatible high speed
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doesn't explicitly say it's an sd card reader but whatever minor details so
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it's usb 3 and it's got a compatible slot back
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there for all those extra pins now the reason we need this is that
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while sd to SATA adapters which you know would
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allow us to plug this into a SATA port
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do actually exist in fact we covered a particularly abominable one of them a
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little while ago on this channel takes 10 micro sds and then gives you one SATA
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interface these products because they're
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pretty stupid haven't been updated in a long time which means they're using very
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outdated controllers in fact this is only running SATA 1 speeds and that was
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the least of its problems in terms of performance so we actually need that
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reader in order to plug our card into
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the system at all oh we're also going to need this
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Windows installed usb
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all right so there's our install
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drive
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forgot about this so
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you can install Windows to a usb device
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um i was actually a little bit worried there that we just it wasn't going to
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show up at all but you need a special type of Windows installation you can't
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just do it by putting a usb install disk in the system and installing it to it it
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doesn't like that so what we have to do is we have to create what's called a
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Windows to go installation
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now i've never successfully gotten that to work before
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so yeah so we're going to use a utility called
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rufus we're going to grab a Windows 10 image that we downloaded from microsoft
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and then we just need to point it at
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our usb drive and
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create a bootable disk it's supposed to just be right here
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so microsoft uh in their infinite wisdom
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stopped allowing you to create a Windows
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to go installer using the not the iso but the like
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Windows media creation tool version
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so what you have to do is actually find
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a disk so fortunately i actually just i
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when i was doing an audit of our of our software around here
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um i just realized some of our Windows installs
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were not 100
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correctly legit uh so i just like ran out and bought a bunch of them so
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otherwise i wouldn't have a genuine Windows 10 disc because otherwise we've
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done everything digitally but what you need to have is an actual disk
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and you have to create an iso from that
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so that's what we're gonna have to do here we're gonna have to go back in time
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and rip this disk okay so we've got a Windows 10 image
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that theoretically should work now
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your target drive doesn't have the fixed oh what the hell are we doing
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no we don't want to use this shoot
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we need this okay
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hold on uh
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no there we go no label 128 gig okay
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hopefully this won't give us any errors
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that doesn't bode well i think we're gonna have to get some
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lunch or something i'm really hungry actually
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here we are so that did take a fair bit longer than usual
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but by all appearances this is like pretty
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normal window stuff c drive
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sony mrws1 usb device
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cool all right so let's do some stuff then
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oh okay i'm feeling a little bit of leg
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wow actually hold up a hold on a second
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like you see anything measured in milliseconds you go it's probably pretty small
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but nine thousand milliseconds is nine
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seconds of average response time
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the main reason that we use SSD controllers
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and not sd cards is not the read and write speeds because those are
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sequential i mean the usb interface is part of the
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problem because compared to SATA or
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pci express NVMe it's much less optimized for random performance but the
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other issue is that an sd card is a relatively simple device it's just a
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little bit of nand flash and there's not really to my knowledge
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really any logic on it um compared to an SSD which has like
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these this complex controller it'll in a lot of cases have like a dram cache and
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it has many nand flash dies on it and then it can
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read from and write to them sometimes all at once in a very strategic manner
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so that it can optimize performance and endurance
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but even if it's not that bad i actually wouldn't recommend this as a daily
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driver system because you would kill your sd card
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probably very quickly it's like even though this sd card can
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do you know 300 megabytes a second reads and writes you can see we're at 99 usage
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at like one mega second total
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and that's because it is not optimized
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come on
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bear in mind of course that this is all on an eight core extreme
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edition processor or 10 core 10 chords excuse me
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it's interesting that even when it's basically not doing anything zero to one
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megabyte a second it still registers as being a hundred
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percent active with average response times in the three
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to five seconds range so we should get some drivers
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so we need a goal for ourselves we've got Windows running off an sd card
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but how normal is this experience
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can we game off it we need to get a game going and steam is
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still updating though i think this might actually be worse
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than running a mechanical drive it's writing at a whopping 500 kilobytes
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per second so it's clearly not doing a whole heck of a lot
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no the graphics driver is not compatible
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with this version of Windows how does it even know the difference
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that's stupid like looking at this there's no
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no there's no discernible difference here it's just Windows
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so maybe it's just that we need
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a bazillion updates which might be part of what it's been
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doing in the background here it's got 79 of them downloaded it's making
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everything so slow i really need steam to finish though
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a full day a full day it took
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over a full day
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for all of those Windows updates to run utterly ridiculous
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what we're doing now is with everything updated
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the game installed but i haven't tried it yet
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we're gonna find out how bad or good
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is the experience this
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is it okay we're in
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so the first thing that's noticeable other than that razer's
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gaming software managed to prompt me to install it itself
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is that our display is scaling correctly this is great
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so as long as no NVIDIA control panel though that's
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weird but this is showing up
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okay i really thought this was going to be a
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lot better without stuff running in the background
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like it's measuring it in bytes per second
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half a megabyte a second
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as far as i can tell it looks like we are ready to go to run
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a game so i installed doom which means that my
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drive is actually almost totally full like
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isn't that trippy opening up this pc
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and there's there's no drive there's just
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usb i just don't know how long it's going to
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take to launch
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that's not bad
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okay i haven't played a ton of doom but like
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that seemed like a very serviceable load time
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what did i do with this oh uh
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oh we had a hitch there
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hitch
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those hitches might have actually been anomalies
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this is not bad
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i am impressed
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oh there you go where'd he go
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get over it oh
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okay
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leg leg honestly this experience is way better
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than i expected you know i think the issues before with
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a little bit of lag might have just been anomalies because this is really smooth
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not bad at all
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ah i mean the game is called doom so you
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know i think we have our answer so
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can you do it the answer is yes
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so yeah it's a pretty crap experience to boot off of all things considered but
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it's not designed for that kind of use and they're blazing fast for just
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straight reads and straight rights and i still think it's
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impressive that it works at all
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i mean the fact that you can run Windows off of something
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this big and it's usable not to mention that like
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okay compared to when i got into pcs the capacity
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is actually similar to what you might have gotten out of something like a mac
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store diamond max 9 like the hard drive
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i got for my first self-built computer was 120 gigs
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and that is freaking incredible because i like to
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tell myself that that wasn't that long ago
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the link in the video description though again not for booting Windows off of
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