USB Duplication

= USB Duplicator Help =

Overview
This page is intended to help you if you're using the NexCopy USB131SA USB Duplicator to build USB media for a Fedora Event.

Inital Setup
Turn asynchronous mode off, and make sure to copy the entire disk area (and not just the partition). Set the write speed to normal.

Speed Check
Before duplicating a batch of USB keys, it is vital that you perform a speed check on each USB key. If you have one slow USB key, it will slow down the entire batch. (At the Red Hat Summit 2011, we found that a single slow key would turn a 7 minute process into a 30 minute process.) The keys we used at Summit 2011 had a read speed of between 13 and 15 Mbytes per minute, and a write speed of 3.5 to 7 Mbytes per second. Anything slower than this slowed down the entire batch.

After checking the speed on each of the keys, move on to duplicating the keys.

Duplication
Duplication of the keys is fairly straightforward -- just be aware of the following:


 * While the duplicator is in copy mode, it will automatically start copying again if you remove all of the USB keys and then insert 31 new keys. This causes problems if you want to do a speed check before duplication.  Insert all but the last key, hit the "ESC" button, select the "Speed Test" option (under "Utilities"), then add the last key.