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DIY SSD
posted on 12 August 2008 09:09
Make your own from flash memory cards
What fun! A harbinger of things to come with open SSD storage? Who knows, but you can try out your own solid state drive (SSD) construction with PhotoFast's CR9000.
It's a 2.5-inch format enclosure containing a SATA 3Gbit/s interface and six slots for SDHC format memory cards. You source these yourself and, using 32GB capacity cards, you can build yourself a 192GB SSD. The enclosure is 9.5mm tall and should (!) fit into most laptops. So if you want to give your sluggish Windows XP - with XP standing for Extremely Pedestrian - an accelerating kick up its SATA interface then spend ¥10,000 on the CR9000. That's under $100. Buy six 32GB SDHC cards for around $150 each and you can upgrade to a road warrior's rocket for $1,000. A 128GB PhotoFast DIY SSD will cost around $700 but an OCZ Core 128GB SSD will cost about $480 at best making this DIY PhotoFast method look expensive.
The PhotoFast performance is said to be just over 111MB/sec reading and 55MB/sec writing. The OCZ Core Series is a deal faster at 143MB/sec read and 93MB/sec read so it looks a better all-round bet.
The situation is getting to the point where a savvy-enough notebook user could add their own SSD to a basic-spec notebok and turn it into a super-charged system. It surely won't be long before vanilla notebooks from Taiwan have high-end models with SSDs in them as a matter of course. Cool!
tags: SSD
