Fantastic tool.
Having a single thumb drive with multiple ISOs on it means you don't have to keep juggling thumb drives ("now where did I put my Debian 12 XFCE installer") or overwriting them over and over ("oh no, this has the 64-bit ISO, but now I need the 32-bit installer").
I have an external nvme with many iso's running ventoy and it's become an absolute staple. I even engraved 'ventoy' on it with a hand engraver so there's never any doubt.
Useful for more than installs too, I have live distros with things like memtest, gparted and clonezilla, which really simplifies little one-off fixes.
How does the external NVMe work? Is there a USB enclosure for it? How does it fare against a USB thumb drive?
There are Thunderbolt based drive enclosures, but the reasonably priced ones are all based on one of a handful of USB to NVMe bridge chips. You usually get a 10Gbps link, so nowhere near the speed the NVMe drive inside is capable of, but about twice the performance of SATA-based USB drives or the fastest that use a USB-native SSD controller. Compared to a typical USB thumb drive, performance is night and day, especially for writes and random access.
Interesting, thank you, though I guess I'd have to go USB 3 or USB-C, as I don't have Thunderbolt.
Something like this tool-less Sabrent NVMe enclosure ($30 https://a.co/d/2JOZsHn) paired with an inexpensive M.2 SSD.
Not sure how gracefully the enclosure downgrades to USB 2.0 speeds, but it's very handy and very fast.
The SSD doesn't need to be fancy. It's overall bigger than a typical thumb drive, but much more reliable and the SSD can be easily swapped out. The detachable USB C cable on the enclosure is also very convenient.
M.2 2242 NVMe/SATA enclosure is a bit smaller, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082CFQYKR/
Mine is a cheapy NVME->USBC external. You do have to be a little careful with the cheap ones, USBC is a somewhat safer bet. Some of them list what chip they're using, which is what I went off of, as I wanted to be able to get full USB3 speed out of it at least.
The reason I went this route is simple really, I wanted something faster/more reliable than a flash drive. Ventoy runs fine off a cheap flash drive, but, it is faster when your device is faster.
Nvme to usb enclosures can work great, but can also be dodgy to work with. I personally find SATA enclosures more reliable overall, as they are less demanding
There are a few issues at play:
1. Power supply issues: the power demands of your mix of enclosure and drive may not be satisfied by your USB port(s), which can vary wildly in capability, and over time.
2. The controller within the enclosure can overheat under load. This seems to happen across many enclosures I’ve tried. Larger enclosures may allow for attaching a tiny heatsink.
3. NVMe drives may not gracefully handle sudden disconnections. USB connections are inherently unreliable interfaces prone to physical disruption and loss of power, which will multiply against any normally hidden non-resiliance in the nvme drive.
If your drive decides to stop showing up, first try loading up the boot device selection screen in the UEFI, and then insert the drive. It may take several seconds to show up. If trying that a few times doesn’t work, the drive may be stuck in some kind of bad state. You may be able to recover from this with the unfortunately poorly known power cycle technique https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/
The technique summarized is:
1. Connect to power (not data) only. Alternatively letting the drive sit at bios setup screen also seems to work. Turn on the power and leave the power on for 30 minutes.
2. After 30 minutes, power down or pull the power cable.
3. Wait 30 seconds, then restore power.
4. Let the drive sit powered on for another 30 minutes.
5. Power down again, then wait 30 seconds.
Always set up automatic backups if you actually have non-replaceable data on the drive. They can and will just suddenly die forever with loss of all data, just like thumb drives. You have been warned.
All that said, there are generally less issues if you are simply putting ventoy on it to just install an OS from an iso.
I have a dual raid1 sata enclosure that I use to boot a windows to go install created with Rufus (https://github.com/pbatard/rufus), which makes testing and benchmarking so much nicer to deal with. I’ve even stuck games on it, and other than relative filesystem slowness it works pretty great, once I added a heatsink to the enclosure controller.
I only recently learned that Ventoy can also boot from Virtualbox VHD files and run them "on the metal".
https://forums.ventoy.net/archive/index.php?thread-416.html
For deployments where China is not preferred in system install/boot root of trust, standalone grub2 can boot multiple ISOs and VHDs.
Sample configs for grub2 ISO boot, e.g. USB or secondary disk partition for system recovery, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38663958
There is dedicated hardware to emulate optical drives, e.g. Korean IODD sells SSD enclosures to emulate up to 4 virtual optical drives in parallel, mapped to ISOs or VHDs. As a standalone device, this keeps untrusted emulation code away from the system CPU. The output of that untrusted code could be verified, e.g. by hashing the emulated ISO.
Indeed, many of Ventoy's magic come from GRUB2, Ventoy just wins in ease of use by autodetecting whatever's tossed onto the drive without manually editing the boot menu.
Microsoft has supported "Native VHD Boot" since at least Windows 7 [1], but it is cool this project can configure it automatically.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/community/t...
Now that’s awesome. Thanks for that, I was not aware of this feature.
It's one of those tools that you don't know exists and then you wonder how you did without. The ingenuity of FLOSS developers never ceases to amaze me.
The only issue I had was two weeks ago where I could not boot Proxmox from my ventoy stick. But Google Shows a bunch of issues with Proxmox installs.