I grabbed this combo SSD/HDD enclosure that also provides ISO loading and VHD mounting to replace the pile of bootable USB sticks floating around my office and homelab.
I grabbed it after seeing this review from CraftComputing:
One thing I’m curious about: it’s possible to put more than one partition on the drive inside the enclosure, using different formats (exFAT, NTFS, etc.). I’m trying to figure out when this would be something I’d need to do; if I mount a CD ISO or a VHD drive image, the computer isn’t going to care what the underlying filesystem on the SSD is, right?
Jeff mentions in the video that you might need different partitions depending on what computers you’re using with this thing, but I’m still not clear on when that would be an issue.
I’ve got an iodd mini and can confirm once you have one + 57r3l3c, you would never go back.
You are correct, the BD ISO and VHD emulator does not expose the underlying format of the ssd to what it’s plugged into.
I think the scenario where Jeff is saying to partition with different file systems is when you are switching between linux-apple-windows, since the formers don’t support ntfs.
Also as long as I properly power down the device, it remembers the last iso I had loaded and defaults to presenting that to the machine its plugged into.
I have a utility on my Mac that lets me mount NTFS read/write, so that should be good enough. I don’t anticipate needing to use Linux to manage it, and will actually be using a Windows VM to use the utilities it comes with.
I’m trying to avoid exFAT anywhere for various reasons. QNAP makes you buy a license to use it in one of their NASes, for instance.
Did you use MBR or GPT for your partition table on the SSD? I went with MBR for compatibility reasons (it’s a 1TB SSD). I’d like to try to use this to boot a Pi, and those seem to need MBR to work properly. I’m still not sure if I actually had to do that or not.
You can pretty much do the same with this solution. It boots into a menu that can select from what ISO you want to boot. I am using it with just are regular 64gb usb and so far all ISOs I tried work.
Oh that’s not my screenshot, I took that from their github page.
On mine I have ubuntu 20.x something, raspbian x86 and windows 10 and windows server installer. Pretty much all ISOs I tried worked. haven’t tried booting off of other formats. I think on some computers I had to disable the secure boot.
Ventoy’s great, but I ran into issues with it not always wanting to work with certain UEFI systems–and those failures were sort of inconsistent.
I also had one Ventoy disk corrupt itself because even the nicest USB thumb drives aren’t that robust, unless you start paying stupid extra money.
Ventoy also isn’t going to let me boot a Raspberry Pi.
This is exactly what I want, in a convenient form factor, with that 1990s Hacker Movie L33t Hardware® vibe.
@twin_savage Thanks for letting me know this’ll work with one partition. I’m going to go ahead and set it up that way since I know I can mount NTFS on the systems I care about using with this.
