@Krishna

Thanks for the run-down on your setup. I am interested
in comparing the efficacy of the poor-man's-boot-the-iso-on-an-HDD
approach and the LiveUSB approach.

I guess it comes down to the transfer rates of each.
Didn't someone make that comparison sometime in the recent past?

In my three pc set-ups, each have both Windows and Linux OS's.
I strictly observe not writing across partitions from one fully
functional OS to another if the filesystems are different.
The hazard of needing to re-install an OS is what I hope to avoid,
not 'data loss', per se.

I favor my Win7 pc which, thanks to the OEM, allows me to select what
to boot-from among the choices of HDD, CD/DVD or USB media, each choice
being allowed to define its own boot process. I've never found a
friendlier 'multi-booting' scheme than this.