ISO Image onto USB stick - "Startup Disk Creator" vs "Disks"

Support & Help Requests
1

I just tried to transfer an ISO image onto a USB stick.

I first attempted to do that with "Startup Disk Creator" and that was taking forever forever, giving me the 2% report after only 10 minutes for a 5.2 GB image !!! Naturally, I abandoned that and went looking for another approach.

I used the "Disks" utility to restore the image and that went, by comparison, super fast, currently at 35% after the same 10 minutes elapsed time.

Just pointing out that someone might want to look at "Startup Disk Creator" (version 0.3.3 on UM 22.04) for a possible underlying performance-tuning problem as relates to USB sticks, vs CD/DVD?

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2

I’ve always used Startup Disk Creator, works fine for me, always did.

Is it slow? I’m on an old machine so I don’t know if it works the same way on new machines, but I do know it takes its time. The bigger the ISO image is, the longer it takes.

For sure, it never worked fast, on old computers like mine, for relatively small ISO images like Xubuntu or Ubuntu MATE it could take 20 minutes, for Ubuntu ISO image which is a couple gigabytes bigger it took a lot more time.

I trust Startup Disk Creator. It does its work just fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. Nothing.

I don't trust people who demand that the universe work according to their whims.

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3

I use Disks and never had an issue to restore (write iso).

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4

Can't you just use dd?

  1. Identify your USB device: sudo fdisk -l
  2. Burn ISO to USB: sudo dd bs=4M if=/path/to/file.iso of=/dev/sdX status=progress oflag=sync
  3. Wait for completion.

For anyone not familiar with dd (man dd), it's bundled with every Linux distro and is intended as a file convert-and-copy process. The flags given in the example above are:

bs=4M - block size of 4 Mb
if = the infile spec (the ISO image)
of = the outfile spec (the USB device)
status = progress (show a progress indicator)
oflag = sync (write per the symbol list, in this case `sync`).

The result should be a bit-for-bit copy of the "infile" (ISO). If it's bootable, so will be the USB device.

Note: the dd command is destructive, which means anything and everything on the target device will be overwritten.

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5

Actually, dd is a block operation, it writes chunks of blocksize since you provide bs=4M

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6

I always used "Disks" (gnome-disk-utility) to restore images. I forgot about "Startup Disk Creator" (usb-creator-gtk) until now.

I don't have a USB drive to test, but all I can see is that Startup Disk Creator hasn't had updates in years (probably because it's really simple tool, so not a concern) and it's written in Python.

As a guess, it might be differences with how the programs handle disk buffering. Disks might finish faster, but it may still be writing in the background (or slows down) at the end due to how the kernel handles the disk. Startup Disk Creator might appear slower, but could be accurately 'syncs' to disk. Different journeys, same result.

The real comparison would be to write an image using both tools, and use a stopwatch to monitor time, and don't declare it finished until this command completes:

sync

If you have a system monitoring applet, that'll probably show "buffers" in RAM, for Disks at least.

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