use usb drive as interior hard drive

i was wondering if there was anyway to connect a usb drive to the ide (pata) port on my laptop instead of using a hard drive. I found a decent 32gb usb drive for about £70 and was thinking of using that. Any suggestions on how this might be done?
thanks

 

What laptop is it?
what USB drive is it?

 

my laptop is an asus s6f
the link to the usb:
http://www.eurowide-pc.co.uk/peak-32gb-flash-drive-xtreme2-200x-retail-p-30510.html

 

any reason why you would want to do this? A hard drive will give you better performance (except for battery life).

 

well as you said battery life would be increased but also heat production will decrease. Read/write performance should be about the same as a 5400rpm hard drive, but overall performance should be better due to the extremely quick random access time of the usb. Anyway do u have any ideas on how to do this?

 

"Acoustic Noise 0 dB @ one meter"

Regards

John.

 

I haven't been able to find a USB to IDE adaptor like you would need for it to be internal.
Read/write speeds would be slower, the USB drive is spec'ed for 33/22MB read/write speeds. 5400rpm should be faster than that but the other advantages should as lower heat/power/noise would stand.

 

So you want to extract the flash disk from the USB and use that as a HD? Because the USB interface and the ATA interface are totally different. In order to hook then up, you will need a converter of some sort, which will only add to the already existing overheads for converting the USB interface into one which can communicate with the flash disk.

The USB interface already slows the flash disk down to write speeds of about 10MBps on average (those 30+MBps are all for promotion only. You might get that kind of speed for about a microsecond, before it drops to 3MBps for the next minute). Add another interface converter and you'll be looking at average speeds in the single digit MBytes/s.

 

i'm not sure about that. i've seen hdtach tests that show fast usbs to match up to their manufacturers specifications. Anyway the way i was thinking was to acquire a usb to ide adapter ( which is used to use internal drives as external ones) and put a double ended usb connector on one end and a double ended ide connector on the other. I'm still trying to figure out what the actual name for a double ended usb/ ide connector is.
any help pls....

 

found what i was looking for - its called a gender changer.
to connect your usb stick to your ide interface you'd need
a ide gender changer (c.£1)
a usb gender change i think its female to female (c.£1)
a usb to ide converter (c.£3)

then of course a usb -
32gb 200x usb (£75)

so for about £80 you could have a 32gb ssd with 22mb write and 32mb read as well as 1ms access time. I really REALLY want to try this out now lol

 

Have you seen that drive actually tested to give those numbers? I'm very skeptical, especially with the larger capacity USB drives. OCZ's Rally2 claims fast speeds too but it isn't as advertised once you go to 8GB and above.

 

Trust me on this, benchmarks are totally different from actual outcome. You will get nowhere near the performance of a true HD.

If you still don't believe me, think about why pretty much no one is using a USB or Firewire external HDs as their main disk. And why eSATA or Gigabit NAS are by far the most popular choice for external drives when performance counts. The reason is because USB and Firewire cannot reach anywhere near their advertised speeds, especially USB.

There have been multiple posts about this already, just search the forums.

 

I see your point, but there have been real world tests for example copying a 300mb folder to and from a usb that show that usb sticks can achieve a good performance rating. Maybe however you're referring to the individual hardware(usb ports) in a laptop that may slow down transfers. But in the method i described you'd be bypassing the usb port.
also there have been a number of people booting various OSs such as linux from usb devices and having relatively good luck.
the only reason why people do not boot a windows os from an external (usb) device is because windows simply won't let you boot from it (usb drivers get loaded too late and so your system cannot boot).

 

The USB port itself is not slow. It is capable of speeds up to 480Mbps (60MBps - about the same speed as an internal 5400rpm HD). It is the little chip on the flash drive which converts the USB signals into signals that can communicate with a disk that causes the extra overheads which slow down the transfer speeds. What you are proposing will slow stuff down even more, because you are converting twice, from ATA to USB to ATA.

It is perfectly possible to boot from USB on new machines with more modern EFI/BIOS. My Macbook is one example. However, the boot speeds are about twice as slow, so it's not worth it.

If you were proposing to REMOVE the flash disk from the pen drive, and someone hooking that directly to ATA, then it would be no different from purchasing a HD and hooking it up directly.

 

Good, but not always what is near advertised.
Another thing to consider is the read/write cycles associated with flash memory devices.

 

everyone's against me lol
i was gonna buy the usb for storage use anyway, so perhaps i might try it.
as for goofball's question, the usb is rated at 100,000 cycles and considering its 32gb, it should last a VERY long time even with a page file.

 

I'm not against you, I'm just stating true facts and offering advice. I meant no offence in any way.

 

Not against you either. Just trying to make you aware of what they say against what it will do. I have many CF cards and usb drives that don't get what they are advertised to do in terms of "x" performance.
Note that 100k cycles might be pretty easy to do for a main OS drive. Think how many files are accessed just to load your OS, or any application. And that 100k isn't a "guaranteed" number, it can be lower than that by a fair margin.

 

If you can solder it's not that difficult. Get the flash drive, take the pcb board out of the case. Mount it inside the laptop with doublesided tape. Find an internal usb header on the motherboard. Solder directly from the header to the usb pins on the flash drive pcb.

People have successfully done this to increase storage space on the Asus EEPC and there is no reason you can't do it to any laptop.