Solved Are optical boot disks more reliable than USB boot sticks?

From a parallel thread

Dch48 said:

I have always found the optical disks to be more reliable. Sometimes USB sticks are hit or miss whether they will boot or not.

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To which I agreed

Haydon said:

A built-in optical disk drive is a must for my present (and next) desktop for that important reason, a reliable boot disk

Click to expand...

... and now I wonder myself why optical beats USB in this regard. Is it perhaps because there is only 1 ODD but several USB ports?

(In yet another thread, USB ports in the front and back of a tower are asserted to behave differently, may or may not have a bearing on the issue)

Personally I've found USB flash drives very reliable. I don't use the optical drive I have on an older HP laptop because of this. All the other laptops I own don't have optical drives.

I keep my Macrium Reflect recovery files and Windows installation files on both a USB stick and on DVD. The USB stick is much faster and the DVD serves as a fallback solution.

In my 35+ years of computer use I can't actually remember a flash drive ever failing on me. either for booting or data storage but I definitely remember plenty of CDs, DVDs and their drives failing on me, boot, data and audio.
The drives are particularly prone to failure since the drive mechanism tends include plastic cogs that wear quickly, rubber bands that stretch, split, come unseated, perish. Then there is the optical head that can scratch, be covered in debris or the laser can defocus, fail and bit rot of the laminates used for the disc.
Flash drives have their fair share of shortcomings as well, bit flip, corrupted file system, broken USB connector, small enough to loose.
But honestly can't remember the last time a flash drive failed to boot a system I worked on.

It is only people who have never had issues with optical drives that would say they are more reliable.

You have to draw a distinction between the media (optical disk, flash drive) and the reader (optical drive, usb port).


Media
Optical disks can get scratched, dirt on them, exposure to heat etc. will reduce efficiency etc.
A well looked after optical disk can last a long time.

Sure a usb drive can fail (fairly rare but risk increases with age - all will fail sooner or later), so they should not be solely used for critical data backup (always have two independent backups at least for critical data).

Reader
Optical drives will inevitably fail as they have moving parts. Age is a factor i.e. not if but when.
The sensors can get dirty as well - standalone drivers used to have cleaning disks but I have not seen any for pc drives for years

USB ports rarely fail - when they do, the mobo is probably failing anyway




In simple terms, the optical drive is the most unreliable item, and a disk is only as good as the reader trying to read it.

So overall it is no contest - a usb drive and reader, is definitely more reliable than a disk and optical drive.

However, all the above is all statistical based - nobody can ever say that your that a compenent of your particular system will not fail early, or will last for a long time. All you can do is reduce risks by redundancy e.g. as @Fortitude says. The amount and type of redundancy depends on criticality of information to be stored.

Hi there
I find the most reliable by far if you have a spare one is to use an external SSD and connect to computer via SATA->USB connector. If you do it right you can have bootable full windows installations, windows install iso's, boot recovery (macrium), windows PE, partition manager, linux distros etc. Absolutely great for any sort of install and recovery. The Ultimate tool.

To install any Windows on a hdd from this drive simply boot the full windows system on it and then run DISM / Apply-Image to the target disk / partition / vhdx.

A 500GB samsung 860 / 870 SSD is absolutely fast enough for this and has enough space for almost anything you want on it -- plus its small enough to ot be a nusiance if travelling and probably less likely to get lost than USB sticks !!!.

Cheers
jimbo

My personal opinion: Optical media may appear to be more reliable as far as booting goes only because there are fewer ways to mess it up. By that, I mean specifically that flash media gives you more options, presenting more opportunities to mess it up.

As an example, I have found that if a user or some app sets up a flash drive as GPT, some apps such as the media creation tool may not correct that situation leading to media that won't boot on some systems.

I wrote a batch file for myself that creates Windows boot media that takes all of these various conditions into account and have NEVER seen it fail even after trying on many, many different computers.

Bottom line - if it ain't working, you probably did something wrong or didn't correct a previous problem with the flash drive first

Some newer opticals won't read older DVDs or CDs, some are fussy as to what brand of media they can write to or only write at a slow speed.
I've got and old PC which has SATA and IDE with an old IDE DVD drive in it purely for getting stuff off some of the older DVDs and CDs I have that are unreadable in newer drives, so I can back up the data to external drives, Old SATA and IDE drives of which I seem to have a cumulated a lot that are still in good condition are useful for that purpose.
Last time I actually wrote anything to DVD on a newer drive, it trashed 4 DVDs before I got one that actually finalised, had to reduce the write speed to snails pace, not bothered since as got fed up with creating coasters and thumb drives are IMO far more reliable for repair and boot options. I've actually disconnected the optical drives from my 2 main PCs and used the SATA ports for additional SSDs.

Haydon said:

From a parallel thread



To which I agreed



... and now I wonder myself why optical beats USB in this regard. Is it perhaps because there is only 1 ODD but several USB ports?

(In yet another thread, USB ports in the front and back of a tower are asserted to behave differently, may or may not have a bearing on the issue)

Click to expand...

I prefer Flash Drives (USB Sticks). I haven't used my DVD drive in aeons, it seems.

I have had no failures.

Haydon said:

From a parallel thread



To which I agreed



... and now I wonder myself why optical beats USB in this regard. Is it perhaps because there is only 1 ODD but several USB ports?

(In yet another thread, USB ports in the front and back of a tower are asserted to behave differently, may or may not have a bearing on the issue)

Click to expand...

it's no longer the case where DVD's are better. In fact a flash drive will totally out perform any DVD,

Haydon said:

From a parallel thread



To which I agreed



... and now I wonder myself why optical beats USB in this regard. Is it perhaps because there is only 1 ODD but several USB ports?

(In yet another thread, USB ports in the front and back of a tower are asserted to behave differently, may or may not have a bearing on the issue)

Click to expand...

1. Not all USB sticks are equivalent. Buy good ones, and they don't usually have problems.
2. I keep both USB sticks and backup CD/DVDs of important bootable things.
3. I always use Verbatim -R CD or DVDs.
4. For USB sticks I like the higher end Corsair, Samsung or PNY models.
5. For USB sticks, always remember to use the "eject" thing in the System Tray before removing them.

As said by Lobsang, the Tibetan motorcycle repairman, that was reincarnated as a computer...
"You can't have too many backups".

From the book: The Long Earth
Side note: I highly recommend the 5 book series.

• The Long Earth (June 2012)
• The Long War (June 2013)
• The Long Mars (June 2014)
• The Long Utopia (June 2015)
• The Long Cosmos (June 2016)

by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

I bought a few USB3 sticks on the last day of Maplin's bankruptcy sale in 2018 for next to nothing. They are Branded Maplin but seem to be to a high standard. Maplin was a UK store equivalent of Radio Shack sadly missed as now there is nowhere to buy individual electronic components and such without going online, which usually means buying in bulk.

I agree with jimbo45. If reliability of external storage media is your true concern, you cannot beat a USB SSD drive.

In my 22 years of using Windows PC's I have only seen one optical drive fail. (I have never seen a HDD fail but that's another story). The number of times I have produced a "coaster" I can count on one hand that has a couple of fingers missing. Boot discs always work. USB sticks on the other hand don't fail either per se but I have had many that either wouldn't boot at all or would only boot on the computer they were made with. Some computers require special procedures to boot from USB. One of mine requires booting into the BIOS and then choosing to boot the USB stick as a boot override. There are no boot order options. My Acer laptop requires pressing F12 at boot to get a boot menu to choose from. A menu that is not guaranteed to even show the USB stick. My other devices I can set a boot order in the BIOS and that works, sometimes.

Yes, the USB sticks are faster, if they're 3.0, and are less prone to damage. However, my experience shows them less reliable as boot media. They're great for data transfer and storage and much more convenient than optical discs in that usage.

My main computer has 2 optical drives. They both read and write CD's and DVD's but one also does that for Blu-Ray. If I need to make a boot media I want to keep. I will more often burn an ISO to an optical disc. I use the free BurnAware program or sometimes just the built in Windows burner. My flash drives are continually being erased and/ or reformatted. I also have the capability of printing a label on the disc with my inkjet printer and I do that fairly regularly. I have burned discs that are 20 years old and they still work perfectly.

Maybe I am just unlucky in this, but my experiences have been very different.

While my current desktop no longer has optical drives, other older ones still do and I have found those to be the MOST reliable boot devices -- maybe because I go to the trouble to keep my optical disks in cases and regularly clean the laser lenses.

Next (down) in reliability has been USB sticks -- but this varies greatly by brand. I have an older Corsair Voyager that has NEVER failed me in all the years that I have used it, but it cost a fortune (back then). I have had newer ones fail me often, probably over 2/3 of the time. I have thrown more away due to this than I currently still have.

Next (down) in reliability has been external drives, with spinners being more reliable than SSDs. I had one spinner last me 5 years and I am two years into my second. I have gone through three external SSDs in under a year and ultimately, given up on using them because they simply won't connect more than half of the time -- and this is independent of whether I use USB-A ports or USB-C ports. And, this is true across seven different PCs, including three laptops of different models and brands.

jimbo45 said:

I find the most reliable by far if you have a spare one is to use an external SSD and connect to computer via SATA->USB connector.

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Just one word of caution on using an SSD as a Windows installation disk:

Some computers don't like to boot from NTFS formatted USB media which may cause you to create one or more FAT partitions on your SSD. Just be aware that FAT does not support TRIM.

I definitely prefer USB flash boot device vs DVD drive. In my desktop PC, the section for DVD drive is empty, instead I have the external USB DVD-RW/BD drive. I use it quite rarely, mostly for reading my old archive DVDs and DVD with drivers for some external hardware components like a Wi-Fi adapter.

Because a boot USB drive needs to be updated not often, its longevity doesn't suffer with time. I don't use them as storage of other files even when they have enough empty space. As an external storage, USB SSD is unbeatable. I use Samsung T5 500 Gb, balanced from the point price/size for me personally (some people may prefer other drives, newer and with more size). For example, I keep on one SSD multi-GB video games for playing from USB 3.1 port (not shooters), no much wearing for two years, performance is quite good. On the other side, USB SSDs are not intended to work as boot devices; I tried but it's hard to create such because need to load the corresponding OS driver during early boot stage.

I have had no real problems with either, except I might die from old age by the time an optical disc finishes.

I was early to the CD burning game. I purchased the first available consumer CD burner on the market. I used to burn CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Rays like crazy. In fact, I had a collection of over 1,500 DVD movies and several hundred Blu-Rays. Now, I've ripped them all to digital format and store them on HDDs. I can't even remember the last time I burned an optical disc, but I still have a couple hundred blank Blu-Rays that I keep around "just in case".

Thumb drives are just WAY more convenient and much faster. I have some thumb drives that will do well over 200 MB/s.

It's funny how things that were at one-time cutting-edge technology can simply fade away into almost non-existence.

NavyLCDR said:

If reliability of external storage media is your true concern, you cannot beat a USB SSD drive.

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I think the same way. But if the data is important be sure you have more than one copy just in case.
That mistake is one many end-users make when storing data. "I can't access my external whatever" calls I receive are frequent.
SSD, standard external, and other media all can and will fail.
I always ask the question, don't you still have said data on the computer and the answer is always no.