You may recollect that last year Michael McDonald and I had observed that using Ubuntu 12.10 �startup disk creator� was considerably slower when creating a USB stick with a persistence file that contains a file system for /home/...

As Ubuntu 13.04 is now out I thought I'd see if this �feature� still persisted.

Using Ubuntu's �Startup Disk Creator� utility, and an 8GB USB stick, I was prompted with the following...

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 When starting from this disk, documents and settings will be:

o Stored in reserved extra space
    How Much? Select between 1GB and 4GB.

o Discarded on shutdown, unless you save them elsewhere
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Opting for the "discarded on shutdown", (i.e. no persistence file) then the figures I got were...

1. Startup Disk Creator: Copying the files (4 mins)
2. Startup Disk Creator: Install the bootloader (1 min)
3. Boot up the USB stick and obtain the Live desktop (1 min)

Total time: 6 minutes

Opting to "store in reserved extra space", and selecting the maximum of 4GB in size, the figures I got were...

1. Startup Disk Creator: Copying Files (4 mins)
2. Startup Disk Creator: Installing the bootloader. (1 min)
3. Startup Disk Creator: Creating the persistence file 4.0GB (16 mins)
4. Startup Disk Creator: Creating the ext2 file system on the persistence file (2 mins)
5. Boot up the USB stick and obtain the Live desktop (7 mins)

Total time: 30 minutes

Conclusion:
If you are creating a USB Live stick, purely to save you burning a DVD in order to do an installation of Ubuntu, then opt for �Discarded on shutdown�.

I found the install of the Ubuntu distro from the USB stick to a sata HDD took 9 minutes. Thus, from an .iso distro, via a USB stick, to a booted HDD took a total of 15 minutes (without the persistence file).

The above figures were with a 2.4GHz quad-core AMD CPU and an 8GB Transonic USB V2.0 stick.

cheers, Ian.