Flash Drives in Bulk Just Got Easier with Popsicle

If you've ever needed to create a bunch of bootable USB drives—for a workshop, a classroom, or deploying machines—you know the pain. It's a serial process: flash one drive, wait, eject, insert the next one, repeat. It's a massive time sink. What if you could just plug in a handful of drives and flash them all at once?

That's exactly the problem the team at Pop!_OS tackled, and the result is a lean, mean, multi-flashing machine called Popsicle.

What It Does

Popsicle is a straightforward, open-source tool with a single, powerful purpose: to write an ISO image to multiple USB devices simultaneously. You give it an ISO file (like a Linux distribution installer), point it at the connected USB drives you want to use, and it handles the rest, writing to all of them in parallel.

It's not just a brute-force script, either. It comes with a clean GTK GUI for desktop users and a command-line interface (popsicle) for automation and headless servers, making it versatile for different workflows.

Why It's Cool

The obvious win is the sheer time savings. Flashing 10 drives takes about as long as flashing one. But the cleverness is in the details.

First, it's safe. The interface clearly shows you the selected drives by their model and size, helping you avoid accidentally overwriting your main hard drive. It also validates the written data by checking SHA-256 sums, so you can be confident the flash was successful.

Second, it's efficient. Under the hood, it's written in Rust, which means it's fast and reliable. It handles the parallel writes intelligently, managing system resources without bogging down your machine.

Finally, it fills a real niche. While there are other multi-writer tools out there, Popsicle is modern, actively maintained, and integrates beautifully into the Linux desktop environment. It's the kind of tool you didn't know you needed until you have a dozen Raspberry Pis to set up for a project.

How to Try It

Popsicle is built primarily for Linux. The easiest way to install it is via your distribution's package manager if it's available.

For Pop!_OS and Ubuntu-based systems, you can install it from the terminal:

sudo apt install popsicle

For other distributions, you can check the GitHub repository for build instructions from source or alternative installation methods. The repo is the best place to file issues, contribute, or see the latest updates.

Using it is simple: launch the GUI, select your ISO, check the boxes for the USB drives you want to flash, and hit "Write."

Final Thoughts

Popsicle is a classic example of a great utility tool. It takes a tedious, repetitive task and makes it trivial. As developers, we often need to provision multiple devices, whether for testing, demos, or hardware projects. Having a tool like this in your arsenal turns a half-day chore into a coffee-break operation. It's practical, focused, and just works.

Check out the project, star it if you find it useful, and maybe keep it in mind for your next hardware rollout.

@githubprojects