Build myself a 2gb SSD SATA for €40
 

Aim is zero noise; performance must be acceptable, but now world-shocking. Found a CFtoSATA adapter here http://www.power4pc.be/webshop/adapt...ard_91661.html for €24



Coupled it with a CF from SanDisk, Extreme III 2Gb card for €15.
result is: acceptable; weirdly enough there is some noise coming CF adapter, electric tjirping once in a while... audible only with the case open.



performance is laughable of course; despite the 30mb/s claim from Sandisk for the Extreme III, the reality is less rosy. The unit does look sweet though, 2.5" disk size; very easy to install in a laptop, in a tower case it just "hangs" some where, no holes in the side to screw it in place... only at the bottom; but on a desktop that's useless.

I also tried a Transcend 8gb CF but it didn't quite work out that well, unable to use the CF to install an OS, windows setup craps out with an error of unusable volume... no biggie though, WinXP install is ~700mb, enough room left.

Installed this cool new ram buffer (32mb) which caches write operations and send them in one go to the storage, what this does is increase the small random write speed tremendously, in case of the Sandisk CF with converter I saw a 467% increase!!



larger writes are slower though... but OS & applications are all in the 4k range; so no biggie.

this is beta software for XP only available at http://zflashpoint.blogspot.com/