Transfer rates run from 50Mbps – 1,000Mbps for such devices, more than twice as fast as USB-based external hard disk drives (HDDs). For $20 to $30 more, you can bump it up to 512GB. Right now, you can buy a decent USB 3.1 NVMe enclosure for $30 a 256GB PCIe x3 NVMe SSD costs the same (or less, down to about $21). For a repair disk, the US$100-plus difference between a USB 3.1 and the faster USB4/Thunderbolt enclosures means the performance boost (from 30% to 60%) is not cost-effective. I’ve been testing and benchmarking USB 3.1 and USB4/Thunderbolt enclosures for NVMe drives lately. This includes dozens of different Windows 10 and Windows 11 ISOs, and more. For that reason, I use a USB-C attached NVMe drive enclosure with a 256GB NVMe drive mounted therein to obtain access to 40-odd bootable images (total size: approximately 180GB). Thus, Ventoy can boot a PC from any bootable image among a collection of such things. Very clever! Ed Tittel/IDGįigure 1: The small partition at right lets the PC boot, builds a list of bootable files from the Ventoy partition in the center, and then passes boot control to any item picked from that list. Users can pick any item from that list, after which Ventoy mounts that item and then passes control for subsequent boot-up and operation to the mounted ISO’s runtime environment. Once the PC is ready to access the Ventoy disk drive, the EFI partition reads the contents of the exFAT Ventoy partition and builds a pick list of all the bootable files it finds there. These smarts come from the partition shown at the right in Figure 1. Ventoy works through what can only be called a “magnificent trick.” Given a small (32MB) partition on a disk drive, it creates a bootable EFI partition that gets the PC boot process started. (See this Microsoft tutorial for relevant details.) Thankfully, Ventoy makes such contortions completely unnecessary. That limitation is hard and fast for FAT32 media, where using larger files requires splitting them into two or more pieces. The best thing about Ventoy is that it can handle and boot from files larger than 4GB. The developers claim to have tested more than 1,000 different ISO files and say that over 90% of the Linux distributions at are supported. It works with most OSes, including Windows, the Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE, of which the Windows Recovery Environment, or WinRE, is a special case), Linux, Unix, VMware, and more.
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