SSD as a boot drive?

I suspect there are a few issues preventing this from being viable:

1) 10GB is very marginal for a system disk. Most people who want the best performance would also want a system that's reasonably capable in other respects as well.

2) There's no standard for clearance around a SATA port. Many motherboards have SATA ports in clusters which would make it very difficult to plug an actual device directly into the port.

3) The device would also require a power connection, since the SATA port itself provides no power. That would make the device bulkier and more problematic in terms of clearance.

4) A device designed to plug directly into a SATA port would have to be very small, similar to a small USB key. That pretty much precludes the use of a multi-channel controller driving several flash chips in parallel, and that's where SSDs get most of their performance. You'd probably end up with something that wasn't any faster than a flash memory card, which really isn't very compelling for a system disk.

Very interesting, thanks for the descriptive response. I hadn't really considered those things, but I figured there was something preventing this as a legitimate option that I hadn't considered, so thank you for enlightening me!