Mac Diagnostic Thumb Drive

Seeing as how I have a bunch of Macs that I own and friends and family have them, I wanted to create an easy way to provide service without having to lug around a computer and target-boot the other computers.

Following the lead from an article on Maciverse, I used a spare generic 16GB flash drive as an externally bootable Mac OS Snow Leopard drive.

After installing the OS I became aware of how painfully slow the drive was. Refreshing Finder windows often took several seconds. I decided to break down and finally buy my first fast flash drive. I dug around and found some great specs on the Kingston Data Traveler 410 boasting read/write speeds of 20MB/S+ so I dropped $40 on Amazon to get one.

I duplicated the finalized generic drive over to the Kingston and booted my Macbook Air off of it and was amazed! It was nearly as fast and responsive as running off the Air's internal hard drive, no errors, and it ran all the utilities flawlessly.

I'll eventually replace the rest of my flash drives with these through attrition.