[IDEA] Boot XBian from USB

[IriDium]

I have successfully booted Xbian off of a USB.

However, be aware there is (or was) an issue on reboot if you have another USB drive attached - i.e your movies and music.

For some reason, the boot process cannot determine the correct USB drive to boot from and hangs. Even though your boot drive is on /dev/sda (and setup in the cmdline.txt) and your movies are on /dev/sdb it gets "confused" and hangs.

Maybe this has changed in Alpha5 12.2 as I haven't tried it since 12.1

When working, I didn't notice any difference in speed between a SDHC class 10 and a USB drive or flash USB of the same specifications. So any performance extras are eliminated with a class 10 SD card. Saying that in normal usage a class 4 works just as well unless you intend any high IO onto the SD card.

As Xbian has never used the allocated swapfile (in my experience) there is going to limited IO to the SD card.

The MAIN reason I would want to use a USB drive or Flash is that the plastic separators around the connectors on a SDHC card are prone to break with continual removal and remounting (I have two failed ones from over extraction and insertion.)

I don't know how a USB drive can help with OC!