Etcher

Given the choice between a DVD and an USB stick, I will pick the USB stick every time. It’s smaller, easier to carry, and can hold a lot more data. And if I ever want to burn an ISO image onto the USB stick, I can very easily do that with the good looking and user friendly Etcher, a tool that was purpose-built to help you flash ISO, IMG, ZIP and other image formats onto USB drives or SD cards.

Etcher is available for all major desktop operating systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux. Focusing on Windows alone, it must be mentioned that Etcher is available as an installer and as a portable version for 32-bit as well as 64-bit Windows editions. No matter what Windows edition you’re running, it will take little time and effort to get Etcher up and running.

Most applications of this type aren’t exactly good looking. They’re practical, I will admit to that, but they’re not easy on the eye. Etcher is different. This application has a dark-themed and good looking interface that clearly spells out the steps you must go through to burn/flash an image onto an USB drive or SD card.

Step 1, select the image you want to burn. IMG, ISO, ZIP, DSK, GZ, RAW, and a few other formats are supported. Step 2, select the USB drive or SD card onto which you want to burn the image. Step 3, click on the "Flash!" button to start the process. Once you hit that button, Etcher will take the image you selected and burn it onto the drive you picked. When it’s done, it will check to see if everything went fine and will safely eject the USB drive. Then it will ask you if you want to flash the same image or flash a different one.

Etcher is free and open source software.

From Etcher’s good looking and user friendly interface you can easily burn or Flash an image file onto an USB drive or SD card. ISO, IMG, ZIP, DSK and other image formats are supported.