We are planning to add an msata support, but for now it is not officially supported.

Crap. I was about to place an order for an Intense PC Pro Barebones with the intent of putting a mSATA boot drive in it as well as a 500GB-1TB 2.5" drive. Could we get at least a broad estimate of when the update will be available? 2 months? 6 months? 12 months?

I'm not trying to be an ass, I was just really excited to pick one of these up. I'll be eagerly anticipating this update.

Current pilot batch of Intense PC supports 9.7mm HDDs

Hi,

Like prpixel I was a little depressed that I cannot easily have a setup with SSD boot and a slower data disk. Are there other possible options, even if slower? Will I be able to boot from USB 3.0? How about a miniPCIe adapter for an SDHC? That would at least have the advantage of putting everything in the case. Failing that, I guess an external SSD connected to an ESATA port will work, but certainly does not follow the aesthetic of small and quiet.

I have already ordered my Intense PC and am hoping that early adopters will not be abandoned when "fixes" come along. I am pretty excited about this product!

Thanks, Duane

You can consider to use one of those disks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_drive. Also you can boot from a USB3

I was considering these hybrid drives also. First of all the Seagate 750GB drive is 9.7mm which will fit in the Intense and Fit-PC3 but not the Fit-PC2. The 500GB drive is 9.5mm but only has 4GB of Cache verses 8GB for the 750GB drive. All of the reviews basically come to the same conclusion; enough space to speed up windows boot time and a few programs but everything else will behave like a regular mechanic drive. I guess for a music server or for somebody that just uses their machine for surfing and mail these drives will work fine. I guess they are a good compromise verses buying a 512GB SSD, or a separate mSata boot drive and a mechanical data drive. Hey, at $89 for the 500GB drive it's a pretty good deal.

My strategy is to use SSDs in all my machines and put the big storage in a Synology DiskStation on the network.

I guess that's where I'm at as well. I have a 14TB file server on my network already, but I was hoping to get a large data drive into the machine as a just in case kind of deal. Probably wouldn't need that much storage, but it's there in case it's needed. Looks like there's no comment on when mSATA support will be added so it's probably not something we'll want to hold out for. 60GB SSDs can be found for ~$50-$60 so I'll likely go that direction.

The hybrid drives don't interest me much. I am not looking only for speed. I want to mount /var, /home and swap space on a mechanical drive to decrease the amount of writing to the SSD. I don't want a hybrid disk drive deciding that /var files should stay in SSD just because there is a constant stream of logging activity. Also the space/cost trade-off is attractive because I can get a small SSD (16 or even 8G would probably do) at a lower cost than a larger SSD and a large 5400 rpm hard drive for data. I think that is what we are all looking for.

These may only be UNIX/Linux concerns, but that is what I use. The Mint box (Fit-PC3 Pro) is supposed to allow msata drive booting, but with a new rev motherboard, so I have my doubts that the Intense PC will accomplish this with only a firmware change. Still, it was the system configuration I wanted, and I accepted the "early adopter" risk factor voting for small, rugged and fanless with my dollars. Hopefully the Compulab folks will do their best for us.

Cheers, Duane

Please consider to use an external large storage. It will free the internal sata interface for the SSD drive