Looking for USB device to SATA controller adapter, does such exist?

[Idontcare]

Here's the deal, I have tons of SATA ports. Want to play with attaching USB thumb drives to my SATA ports.

Obviously I have some RAID playing-around in mind. Tired of waiting for Samsung to decide more people than just Tom's Hardware should get to play with large flash drives.

Now I am pretty sure I can kludge (sp?) together a series of the right combo of male/female adapters so that I can convert your typical "SATA drive adapter for USB ports" into such a beast...but it would be great if such a thing already exists.

I have already done some lengthy googling...nothing has come up thus far.

Anyone out there heard of such a thing? (USB device -> to SATA controller)

 

[phisrow]

Such a widget is by no means impossible; but, if it exists at all, it is a very rare special purpose device. I've never seen or heard of one. If one did exist, it would have to act as a USB host port that emulates an SATA drive. Doable; but not trivial.

This is useless if you already have the thumb drives; but the closest you can easily get to what you want is to use CF cards. Those are actually ATA devices, with the appropriate pinout adapter. Pinout adapter+ PATA to SATA converter + CF card = SATA SSHD. CF cards cost, per gig, roughly the same as USB keys.

 

[Zepper]

It is easy to adapt a special purpose interface like SATA or IDE to a generalized interface like USB but not the other way around. Very unlikely.

.bh.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: phisrow
Such a widget is by no means impossible; but, if it exists at all, it is a very rare special purpose device. I've never seen or heard of one. If one did exist, it would have to act as a USB host port that emulates an SATA drive. Doable; but not trivial.

This is useless if you already have the thumb drives; but the closest you can easily get to what you want is to use CF cards. Those are actually ATA devices, with the appropriate pinout adapter. Pinout adapter+ PATA to SATA converter + CF card = SATA SSHD. CF cards cost, per gig, roughly the same as USB keys.

Brilliant! Yes I know exactly what you mean. Look at this gizmo: SATA CF adapter

Takes CF cards straight to SATA.

Wow, these guys are already beating me to it: Booting Operating Systems off a Compact Flash Card

Looks like I can get 1GB for ~$15-$20, 2GB for ~$33-$40, 4GB for ~$63-$75, and 8GB for ~$130-$170.

Options, options, options.

By rough calculation, for $100/4GB (w/adapter) or $200/8GB...I could assemble a raid-0 array of 8 CF cards or so and have a 32-64GB storage array with ~200+MB/s read/write capability and negligable access latency for around $800-$1600.

Wonder how long the CF cards would last in a 24x7 environment. Probably wouldn't want to raid-0 them, maybe put them into a Raid 5 or 6 array. They'd be easy enough to replace should any one of them get over-used and need some retirement, prices will probably decline 50% in next 12 months.

Thanks for the help phisrow.