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... === 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 === 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.