Mod: Converting a USB stick into a DIY SSD..

The plan is as follows:

all the components have been bought, and I am awaiting delivery...
the ide gender changer will then be attached to the ide connector on my mobo.
any ideas on whether or not this will work?
don't bother asking about space since there is plenty of space in my laptop (since mine doesn't use a caddy, just a connector).
of course once i've confirmed this works, i can remove the plastic off of each of the components, and solder them together, and also reduce the length of the usb cable (to save space).
cheers

ps i know some of you will probably say its a waste of time, but i just like doing mini projects like this lol

 

Waste of time and money I am afraid...
Even if it worked (which I highly doubt), transfer rates via USB would be terrible.

Better ask for a refund and buy a real SSD

 

Thats a great idea i'm sure you'll notice a good speed increase, although you'll be limited by the bandwidth of usb 2 of aobut 30mbs per 2nd but not too bad, be interesting to see how fast it does go!

FWIW i just checked and on my seagate 7200.8 300gb drive in a usb 2.0 enclosure tranfer rates were all 29MBs/S with a 15.2 MS access time, so you have the potential to see 30mbs per second just depends how the flash chips in the usb drive work.

 

Firstly why do you doubt it will work? Secondly as I said this is just a mini project, i'm not doing it because I want an ssd lol, and thirdly i already had the usb stick, and the rest of the components cost me nothing.

a speed increase? i dunno... maybe. i'll post my results in a couple of days when i fit all these components together.. i agree it will be pretty interesting to see the benchmarks if it works

 

Well, the seek times should be much better than a hard disk... but the transfer rate might suck, yeah.

I don't even think USB will be the limiting factor... I don't think most USB flash sticks have anywhere near the performance of a "real" SSD. It probably depends on the stick though, to some extent.

But, if you don't care about that too much, it could be a nifty project.

 

Well at the moment i'm using a compact flash card as my hd using a cf to ide adapter, so I don't anticipate any performance improvement down to seek times. I will be using a relatively mediocre performance usb for testing first, and once i've confirmed that it works, i'll try one of the faster, higher-capacity ones- the pico-c 8gb and the 32gb xporter xt, in particular caught my eye.

ps if this works i'm thinking of placing all the components into a standard hard drive, 7 cm x 10 cm x 9.5 mm case
lol it'll look just like a normal ssd

 

crap i just realised something... the end of the usb to ide cable has no jumper selection, so how will I configure it as master? any help appreciated i'm hoping it will just default to master, but i'm not sure.

 

Sorry, this won't work. The USB to IDE cable device actually contains a small USB to IDE controller circuit board/component. It won't work in reverse. Great idea though, but you're better off thinking of improving the CF to IDE DIY SSD, improve the CF speeds or size capacities rather than a USB flash drive.

 

thanks for providing a reason, i guess there's no harm in trying anyway since the components are already bought. at this point in time, with ssds constantly decreasing in price, it'd be pointless for me to buy a faster and/or larger compact flash cards. cheers anyway!

 

jisaak few links that you might find interesting. It's about modding Eeepc(s) and turning USB sticks into SSD.

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=3982
http://beta.ivancover.com/wiki/index.php/Eee_PC_Internal_Upgrades

 

Those are fine since it uses the native USB controllers on the board. Tehy are not trying to convert them to IDE.