On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 2:27 AM, Lists <lists at benjamindsmith.com> wrote: > 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 > Some of the newer workstation/server boards have an internal USB (female) connector soldered on to the board; specifically meant for embedded OS. I have seen it on the Supermicro and Dell systems. > I'd be concerned about getting a higher quality drive than the $10 > givaways at Staples; Anybody here ever tried this? Make sure you do buy industrial quality USB pen drives. I use Apacer but there are others in the market. I prefer to use SATA Disk on Modules (DoM). For basic server install a 2GB DoM is plenty. In either case, do not put swap on the flash drive. -- Arun Khan