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jama211today at 6:07 PM1 replyview on HN

I’m confused by the wording “without wasting disks for the base OS” - I wouldn’t normally consider this a “waste”, would anyone else? There are big downsides to running off of a USB key all the time unless I’m missing something


Replies

zjatoday at 6:13 PM

> This architecture has a variety of advantages including increased security, no need for patching, fast upgrades and recovery.

SmartOS was developed by Joyent for their cloud computing product, it's primary use case isn't desktop computing. I think the advantages mentioned above were probably a bigger factor than the disk space. I would also guess that PXE would be the standard way to boot in a datacenter, not USB.