[Zilog8]

I've been looking around into squeezing a 2.5" sata drive into my mini 12.
As we've all seen here, there is plenty of space for heavy modding.

So, here's the plan:
Get a expresscard to esata adapter, strip it to its bare essentials (no connectors, etc)
Wireup the expresscard to the minipcie slot
Get a sata data and power cable
Wire up the data cable to the sata port
Wire up the power cable to the two usb ports on the left (2.5" sata drives only use 5v and ground, no need for 3.3v or 12v)

I won't be able to execute this plan till I'm back in the USA around august, but till then, anyone have any comments/interest/ideas?

[Offroadie]

Why not just use a sata to usb adapter and solder that in?

[Zilog8]

Well, I've got a usb-sata adapter and had considered that, but when I used h2benchw to measure it's performance, it was even slower than the built-in hardrive. I think it's cause of the intermediate USB step, so I'm hoping that, with a more direct pcie-to-sata connection, it'll run faster enough to make the effort worth it. I'm planing on benchmarking the adapter with a laptop that has a pciexpresscard slot first though (don't want to do all that soldering if there is'nt going to be a reasonable benefit from it).