But since they were small and old, the better solution in most cases would be to clone them to a larger and faster target drive, and then use the target drive to boot the operating system. In a pinch, I could run the operating system from one of those drives. It occurred to me that one legitimate end-of-life role for relatively smaller and older USB drives would be to treat them as working physical repositories of recent versions of Windows or Linux system drives. For instance, they might be stored on a drive that I couldn’t get to at the moment, for one reason or another. Meanwhile, sometimes I found that backup drive images weren’t always an ideal solution. As faster and newer USB drives became available and affordable, I began to accumulate little old USB drives that I didn’t really need anymore.
