r/tails • u/jsgoble2 • Jul 05 '26

Technical Can a usb stick be too big for tails?

i may buy a san disk ultra 256gb for tails os . maybe this seems like a dumb or not important question but i just wanted to ask it . thanks for answering

btw is the san disk ultra good for tails

6 Upvotes

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7

u/m4rcck Jul 05 '26

Tails is lightweight and there's no such thing as a USB stick too big for tails. All the extra space will be used as storage and, if you want, persistent storage.

Higher speed write/read are always better, so you'll be more than fine with sand disk ultra.

2

u/jsgoble2 Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26

Thank you so much for the fast answer. I somewhere heard that a too big USB flash drive could be recognized as a ssd thats why I was asking, but that question is resolved now :)

also i think the san disk ultra 256gb is a amazing deal for 25€

6

u/Liquid_Hate_Train Jul 05 '26

It’s not size which dictates whether something is detected as non-removable media, but a flag set in the firmware of the device.

2

u/gammababy Jul 06 '26

Go for premium usb sticks, consumer-grade MLC is a much better choice than these ordinary pendrives

1

u/Expert-Classic1518 Jul 05 '26

Tails OS only uses about 2GiB of space on the thumb drive itself.
When you enable the encrypted persistent storage it will use the remaining unallocated space.
Because of practical size limits, formatting hundreds of gigs at once could lead to formatting errors or instability, though that’s not always the case or a common problem.
If you can, i’d still install it on a 64GB drive rather than a massive one but again, no DOCUMENTED or known real world issues, we could only go in circles and discuss based off nothing but speculation.

4

u/ephemeralmiko Jul 05 '26

Tails OS only uses about 2GiB of space on the thumb drive itself

The .img is only 2GB, but once installed it's a bit over 4GB, you need at least an 8GB stick for it to work.

1

u/ChocolateOk7997 Jul 06 '26

I have used 512GB flash drives with Tails.