size of usb stick for Yosemite recovery

[sean barry]

I need an USB flash drive USB stick? What is the required size?
Optimum size?
Pricing is not an issue.
Any recommendations for brand?
USB3 or 2?
Are all USB sticks "flash drives"?
Thanks.

 

[grahamperrin]

Apple Support

OS X: About Recovery Disk Assistant

System requirements include an "external USB hard drive or thumb drive with at least 1GB of free space".

For what it's worth, I'd choose a 16 GB drive. Imagine yourself doing more with the drive than a Recovery OS alone.

An inexpensive USB 2.0 drive should suffice. Use of Recovery OS should be fairly infrequent, and it's not a large OS on disk, so the speed shouldn't be a great concern.

 

[Gav2k]

Just the recovery tool 1gb

Recovery tool plus os 8gb

I'd go usb3 as it's painfully slow recovering from usb2.

 

[grahamperrin]

… Recovery tool plus os 8gb …

I know that there was, somewhere else, an 8 GB recommendation but in practice: I found that capacity to be insufficient for some use cases.

… slow recovering from usb2.

The worst of the slowness is usually a fragmented catalog B-tree.

 

[EricNau]

I recently made a Yosemite disk with an 8gb drive; worked well.

 

[grahamperrin]

I recently made a Yosemite disk with an 8gb drive; worked well.

I haven't tried with Yosemite.

8 GB also worked well, well enough, for an earlier OS (probably Mavericks) … for a while. I can't recall the chain of events that caused me to regret choosing an 8 GB drive, but I did regret it.

 

[EricNau]

I haven't tried with Yosemite.

8 GB also worked well, well enough, for an earlier OS (probably Mavericks) … for a while. I can't recall the chain of events that caused me to regret choosing an 8 GB drive, but I did regret it.

If pricing is not an issue, 16gb certainly couldn't hurt.

 

[grahamperrin]

Types of USB stick

… Are all USB sticks "flash drives"? …

For what you have in mind, it'll make sense to avoid any USB flash drive that uses hardware-based encryption. Some such drives – Verbatim Secure Data USB Drive 16GB (44071) for example – are visually indistinguishable from encryption-free drives.

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There are other types of USB stick, some of which have wireless applications (for example, the stick with/within a Kensington Wireless Presenter with Red Laser (not a product I'd recommend, incidentally)) but you're not likely to purchase any such item by accident.

If you shop for a "USB flash drive", any respectable retailer will know basically what you want.

 

[maflynn]

I recently made a Yosemite disk with an 8gb drive; worked well.

I've used 8GB, that's a safe size. Given the price USB thumb drives, you might as well get the larger size, since it won't cost you much.

 

[sean barry]

Thanks all

I got a 32GB Cruzer Glide from SanDisk. some reviews said it is slow and some said if you erase it, it works better/faster. So I did.
Now I have Mavericks on 1 external FW drive, Yosemite on the internal HD in the Mini and will shortly install Snow Leopard on a 200GB partition on the internal HD. I don't think I need to fix SL with a flash drive because I have the original DVD of SL?
For Mav and Yose I would need the flash drive correct? I should be able to partition the flash and place the boot for each on it's own partition?
Thanks again and please keep walking me thru my ignorance