Build your own SSD, out of CF cards.

[VirtualLarry]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816111059

 

[justinm]

That's temping just to try out....

 

[jvroig]

I thought CF cards were horribly slow compared to SSDs we have now? Or at least, that's what I remember from the very first EEE PCs that came with 4GB CF Cards.

 

[Tristor]

Quoting from a review "Performance is better than a 5400 but not quite as good as a 7200 drive. Start up is quick and opening apps is better than average. "

That's about to be expected. CF cards are not especially quick, in fact flash in general is not especially quick. The reason an SSD is fast is that it takes many flash chips and stripes across multiple channels (like RAID0 internally). An Intel X25-M for instance has 10 channels. If you take the write and read speeds of the drive and divide by 10, that's roughly the speed of each individual chip, and those are some of the faster NAND available on the market.

2 CF cards is never going to remotely match the speed of an SSD. The best implementation of this is when space doesn't matter, but shock resistance or vibration does, so you use this instead of a hard drive because you can do it cheaper than an SSD. But with the availability now of the X25-Vs and other smaller fast SSDs for under $150, I can't imagine this being more cost effective.

In other words, this is a dud product. Avoid.

 

[frostedflakes]

The silly thing is it's not even any cheaper than an SSD. This enclosure and 2x32GB CF cards is going to set you back about $200. A 60GB Vertex is like $170-ish, faster, more reliable, etc.

 

[firewolfsm]

They have some 4 channel CF controllers, with fast cards it can almost match an SSD

 

[kevinqian]

but it won't have advanced wear leveling and TRIM support from a real SSD controller. So you will wear out the CF cards real fast. CF nand flash is about the cheapest nand they make, won't stand more than a few thousand writes.

 

[PCTC2]

I used something like this back in the day. I had a few compact flash cards laying around from my old digital cameras. I had an iBook that would kill any physical drive you put in there.

I put in 2x 8GB Compact Flash using a CF-to-IDE adapter. Wasn't faster or slower than normal, but had 2x the battery life.

And I've run OSes off CF-to-IDE adapters. Put in a 4GB CF. Load Linux and Folding@Home, and I have a secondary bootdisk for when I fold bigADV on linux. Then I can reboot to Windows if need be.