SATA small drive for booting
 

I came up with an idea today, and I'm praying somebody beat me to it, so that I can go buy it, but I can't find it. I want drives, say 8 or 16GB, that are the size of my SanDisk Cruzer but rather than USB or ESATA, have a SATA connector on it.

It seems reasonable to me to use these for booting and running OS/swap. No need to remove, because you want them to have same disk identifier for GRUB. What you gain is tons of performance and you still have drive sled room for your storage disks. Even better you can use external/network storage and significantly reduce space usage. SATA uses 8 connectors and USB 4. The question is, can you convert a USB disk to SATA?

By the way... Patent pending. hahahahaha

---------- Post added at 06:25 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:48 PM ----------

Ha, I found it. Brilliant. It is done a little differently, but I think it might serve my purpose.

Newegg.com - Patriot Lite PL64GPEPCSSDR 64GB mini PCIe Internal Solid state disk (SSD) Designed for ASUS EeePC 900, 900A, 901, 900 16G and 1000 only - Solid State Disks

The question now is. When does this drive get detected. Can it be booted from. I'll be reading more on this.

I'm sure you can. You can boot from CF cards, SD cards, usb flash, usb hard disk, and so on. give it a shot!

The one at Newegg is PCIe. You can't boot off of PCIe but it would be so fast. What you want is a solid state drive. I have the Intel X2-M 80GB SSD. I use it as a boot drive and it is fast as hell. The problem is that they are expensive. The one I have runs about $300. This one came out recently and it is the best available on the market. It is $200 for 64GB and geats 200/160 MB/s read/write. I wouldn't get anything other than either the Intel or the OCZ Vertex. Almost all of the others use a shitty controller that can cause stuttering and shitty performance.

I thought you could boot from the PCIe if it had a SATA controller. Either way, you are correct. I do want a solid state drive. I just want it to be only about 8GB and in the shape of a thumb drive so that it just sticks off of the motherboard rather than a bigger disk than I need and a cable. It seems so easy to build, why don't they have these?