I recently rebuilt my old Surface Go Gen1 with Fedora Silverblue. It’s running Gnome now, and playing audio through the Amazon Echo Spot on my Desk makes it an excellent little media device for my desktop.
Anyway, that’s not why i’m posting. I got stuck in a loop trying to get it to boot from the USB drive. While I was trying a range of options in that process i discovered Ventoy.
I have an old Verbatim that must have had a hundred different boot images blasted onto it over the years. With Ventoy it now appears that i can have all of the ISOs that i might want to boot from on the one drive.
Am i the first or last one here to discover this option?
Ventoy is excellent. I’ll add that my solution to this problem was using a USB drive from iODD which mounts disk images as virtual drives. Both the ST300 and ST400 have this functionality (and probably other models they manufacture). Docs for the slightly cheaper ST300 linked here Iodd-ST300 - iODD although I use the encrypted ST400 variant myself.
The drive has a small menu and keypad on the front which can be used to select ISOs in the case of mounting a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray image, VHD/VMDK for Hard Drive images, or IMA files for a floppy drive image. If you need it to, it will simultaneously mount an ISO plus several HDD/FDD images, while allowing you to use the “real” SSD inside at the same time. Mounted ISOs show up as a bootable optical drive in BIOS/UEFI and I’ve never had an issue booting from an image on any machine I’ve used it on.
It’s not the cheapest option - I think I picked mine up a few years ago for around $150 - but it’s definitely quicker and easier than setting up ventoy or writing to USBs (or burning physical discs) all the time. Simple as dragging and dropping an ISO onto the STx00 unit, moving it to the machine you need to use the image on, and selecting the applicable file name(s) from the front of the device.
I looked up devices like that, and they are super cool. I probably don’t need them that often to justify it. The encryption aspect of it looks cool though.
Actually, I’d like to free up some space on my nas with an external hard drive because I almost never use that stuff. I’m just not sure how reliable a hard drive is if it sits in a drawer for 5 - 10 years.
Funnily enough, I bought the ST400 over the ST300 because I had originally intended to use the device for that sort of offline long-term archival, and thought it would be better off to have encryption in place that didn’t rely on software. It ended up finding more use as a virtual drive for ISOs and such. Perhaps that’s justification for a second unit at some stage, haha!
One thing that I don’t like about the iODD devices is their utilities are only available for Windows. I’m not keen on using Wine or VMs to try and run anything to change settings on hardware like that, so it’s meant keeping a Windows machine around for occasional use for utilities such as the iODD settings and firmware updaters. Other than that, the ST400 unit works remarkably well.
For what it’s worth, I’ve got several drives from as far back as the early 1990s still running! Some have been used a lot, some have been sitting in drawers for a long time, most in use are slowly being replaced with solid state devices + adapters (CF cards, SD/micro SD cards, DOMs, etc.). I’ve only ever had a handful of those old drives fail, but perhaps that’s only because they didn’t have the data densities and cost considerations that modern drives do.
Depending on how much you’ve got to archive, perhaps something like M-DISC might be an option? They were specifically developed for archival purposes, can be read by almost all DVD/Blu Ray drives, and can be written by most drives made in the past 10 years or so. That could be a relatively affordable option to archive data, assuming you were happy with the write-once constraint and it’s not terabytes of data.
