Cheap Solid State Drive, DIY SSD from €180
July 16th, 2008 by Jason Roe. Post is filed under Technology.
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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 IDE and SATA that will fit in a 2.5” drive slot.
A combination of the CF adapter kit plus 3 x 16gb cards (48GB total) comes to about €180 before shipping/taxes. That is a saving of around €300 odd euro compared to some of the retail drives..
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 reference on gizmodo to a SD card solution. This second device seems to be no longer available.
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July 18th, 2008 at 4:17 am
[...] a cheap SSD drive? Jason shows [...]
July 20th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Cool! thanks for posting this. If only I still had any desktop boxes instead of laptops
July 20th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
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 .. .. http://url.ie/jgp
I cant see the 2.5″ specs on the geekstuff4u site, but it looks about 2.5 ..
What ye think?
September 16th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
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 ?