I had a bit of a brainwave today. I started looking into using SD cards in an array that could be used as a cheap solid state drive. With the price of SD memory dropping it seemed like a sensible alternative to expensive drives on the market.
On my travels I bumped into a nice bit of kit that allows you to create a do it yourself SSD Drive (SATA in Raid0 or Raid5) with 3 Compact Flash cards. This comes in two flavours and that will fit in a 2.5” drive slot.
A combination of the plus 3 x (48GB total) comes to about €180 before shipping/taxes. That is a saving of around €300 odd euro..
Speeds and costs may vary depending on the quality of the card. The CF kit says that the max/recommended rate is 20MB/s. Not too shabby.. but also not that fast compared to retail drives. The limitation seems to be the cards that you use.
I also found a to a SD card solution. This second device seems to be no longer available.
Cool! thanks for posting this. If only I still had any desktop boxes instead of laptops
Thanks for the comment Justin.
I think the CF kit is designed for a 2.5 laptop .. based on a similar product found on gizmodo .. ..
I cant see the 2.5″ specs on the geekstuff4u site, but it looks about 2.5 ..
What ye think?
and if you used larger CF cards, I think I recently saw 32GB ones for around $100 in BestBuy, you would really have a nice little drive on your hands. Is there a max size these drives can support though ?