We got asked this in email recently, so I am going to throwmy answer up here: the quick secret of making bootable USB keys is to know that USB keys are hard drives.

The person who asked the question described what they'd done as:

In short, I've copied the files from the isolinux directory on theinstallation CD to the USB drive, renamed isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg,erased isolinux.bin, unmounted the USB drive, and runsyslinux /dev/sda1

As computers (and disk space, and memory, and etc etc) get larger, thequantities that we deal with routinely get bigger too. And when they getbigger, fun things start happening.

Today's fun thing was that I doing some measurements of disk IO speed ona machine with 2 gigabytes of memory. My usual rule of thumb is to workon at least twice the amount of main memory to crush cache effects, whichmeant I was telling my benchmarking program to read and write 4 GB.

Here's a good argument-starting question: which is faster and/orbetter, hardware RAID or software RAID?

A lot of conventional wisdom says hardware RAID, but I mostly disagree.Let's ask the inverse question: how (or when) can hardware RAID befaster than software RAID?

If you're doing RAID-5, the hardware could do XOR faster than your CPUcan. But in modern systems XOR performance is pretty much constrainedby the memory bandwidth, not CPU power. It