Balena Etcher is a free, open-source Windows application that can write CD-ROM images to USB drives. Unfortunately, it is very slow. Writing an image can be a time-consuming task. An image can be large. However, Balena Etcher is slow where it doesn’t need to be. For example, it takes a long time to start up. So long, in fact, that on more than one occasion, I accidentally started a second instance while waiting for the first one to start (thinking that I had not correctly started the program the first time). It is also slow when picking the ISO image to read from and when picking the USB drive to write to. It also spends a lot of time “Starting” while displaying an advertisement for Balena. Once the long “Starting…” period is over, the writing finally begins and is relatively quick. Worst of all, however, I kept getting the error below:
I would receive this error despite having a USB drive connected to the system, as I could see physically and through Windows Explorer. That was enough to convince me to use something else for burning ISO images to USB.