Saw a trick today, wondering if anybody else had done/tried this? Assume you have a 1U rackmount with 4 front-accessed drive bays, and you want all four bays for a 4-disk RAID5 storage.
The idea is to use an internal USB adapter and a couple of bigger USB thumb drives to install to, RAID 1 style, freeing up all your external drive bays. At first, I didn't think that a thumb drive would hold enough for the O/S, but in actual production use for a file server with 14 TB of redundant storage, the OS actually uses less than 6 GB!
Here's the internal USB adapter specifically mentioned: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007PODI1W
I'd be concerned about getting a higher quality drive than the $10 givaways at Staples; Anybody here ever tried this?