I have only seen the ability to change light patterns once on a funky USB stick years ago - It had a number of LEDs and you could do a variety of things, I got it free at a trade show, but it was rubbish... the driver kept crashing, made BSOD and more!
On bog standard USB sticks, the LED is directly controlled by the USB drive and not the machine. The only way to stop it will be to open it up and physically remove the LED... or if possible, you may just want to put a bit of tape over it.
Hubert, good summary of the various options. What did you ultimately go with?
One user says that the SuperTalent SR32C7MME is a true mini-PCIe card, not mSATA. If that's true, its claimed 350/80 MB/s read/write write speeds should make it the best choice: http://communities.intel.com/message/143517#143517
As you note, what definitely won't work are the mSATA cards. They physically fit in a latop's mini-PCIe slot, but use a different protocol, which only some very new laptops support.
At first I thought using the laptop's "PC Card" (PCMCIA) slot would make the most sense, but very few SSDs are made in the CardBus form factor, they're all fairly small and expensive, it's not clear whether a CardBus SSD will even work correctly in an adapter in a PC Card slot.
The newer SDXC cards, although not that fast, might still be a good choice, if they actually work in your laptop's SD slot. It sounds like they might not. As you point out, a Compact Flash card in the PC Card should work, but I haven't tried that either.
Hardware examples of each of the above (this stupid website will not let me post actual links to the products, so you'll have to google):
- $116, 32 GB SuperTalent SR32C7MME:
- $180, Intel 310 Series 80GB mSATA Enterprise Solid State Disk SSDMAEMC080G2C1 (will not work):
- $230, Wintec FileMate 96GB 3FMS4D096JM-R:
- $78, Wintec FileMate 64GB Secure Digital Extended Capacity (SDXC) Model 3FMSD64GBXC-R:
- $160, Transcend 64GB Compact Flash 400X Model TS64GCF400:
Best Answer
I don't own any high-speed thumb drives, but my experience with standard-speed thumb drives is that they are slow to operate from. They're great in a pinch, but I wouldn't want to use that as my regular way to work. Definitely get the fastest thumb drive you can if you plan to use a "regular" Linux distro.
Another approach, which minimizes the speed issues of a thumb drive, is to use one of the lightweight distros that load everything into RAM and run from there. If your software needs are modest, these will also load a lightweight office suite into RAM. These can take a little longer to boot up (thumb drive speed will affect boot time, but only the startup time is affected). Once they're loaded, they're lightning fast for everything you have to do. A few distros that are good for this purpose:
Puppy Linux. Puppy Precise has been my all-time favorite for this purpose because I haven't run into any hardware it couldn't handle out of the box, it is user-friendly, and everything works. I haven't bothered to update it, but there are several newer versions as of end-October 2014: Quirky, which is optimized for flash drives, and Tahrpup, based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (I haven't tried either, yet).
There are several 64 bit versions of Puppy. Lighthouse is the best I've found so far, although it is temporarily not being maintained. That comes with full-featured software. Fatdog64 is also good but comes with a light-weight software bundle. If you are going to stick with the bundled software, Fatdog64 doesn't buy you much over the regular Puppy distros.
Porteus is another that will run in a reasonable amount of RAM. Version 3.1 Final (12/2014) is a good, stable distro that is pretty problem free. This comes with full-featured software, although the desktops are a little stripped down for size.
PCLinuxOS is excellent, but out of the light-weight class. It requires 1 GB of RAM, particularly if you select one of the heavier desktops, which come with full-featured software.
Those are the best I've found for this purpose. This link lists distros that run from RAM, although many are either special purpose or not an "out-of-the-box" workplace.