Well, the *need* was between asterisks for a reason .
Still - though I have no way to prove it - I am pretty sure that a "plain" USB 2 stick with a decent controller can run circles around an Isostick even with one of it's legs tied behind it's back.
And with semi-automated stick building - like the Easy2boot thingy Steve6375 put together - both the lazy expert and the inexperienced user can put together a "stick full of ISO's" with very little effort (and with the advantage of using if needed/wanted NTFS, hence "monolithic" larger images)
Dont' take these as pointless critics, they are only meant to let you know my point of view on the matter, but then the only advantage of the ISOstick that remains is the use of micro SD cards (in theory you can have an unlimited number of these and thus an infinite amount of .iso's) and the write blocking switch, but these are not something that really-really make me tear my hair off from the joy.
Being personally cheap, and as a matter of fact very cheap, I cannot but make some economic comparison:
- Isostick + Sd card= between 100 and 130 US$ depending on capacity of the card (last time I checked, I might be vastly incorrect in this )
- "plain" stick 32 Gb = around 20-25 US$
- superfast stick (USB 3/SSD) 32 Gb= around 90 US$ <-added advantage that it is seen as "fixed disk", useful on some BIOSes
To this you need to add (and again this is not intended as a particular critic only as an objective representation of facts) that the Isostick is often "out of stock", that the promised "bettered firmware" has not been delivered (or it was not "bettered enough") in a "reasonable" amount of time and that the "initial" geekish/novelty effect has faded away.
In other words (and IMHO) the Isostick for a brief initial period of time has been "leading edge" and "must have", after almost one year of life it has lost some of it's attractiveness and a "refresh" might be needed. (things age faaast in this field )
Please, consider also how the completely faked data represented in my USB stick graph:
http://reboot.pro/to...al-pe/?p=166593
may have a (minimal) adherence to real life.
And remember how that is "yeah, well, that's just, like, my opinion, man." :
http://reboot.pro/to...stick/?p=166703
Wonko