2 - The cheap version (tested)

Using a CF to IDE Adapter

The first thing we will try is the CF-IDE adapter that cost us only 15 EUR. You can find these items everywhere on the web. Browse eBay a little. There are many versions available like single, dual CF, flexibe SATA versions (still will use IDE mode btw), most importantly, they are dirt cheap. A good way to build a cheap SSD. Have a look at the photo below:

This is our CF-IDE converter - 15 EUR incl shipping. It'll fit in our traditional IDE connector. We use the floppy power connector to feed it some juice and can insert two CF v2.0 cards if that would please us.

Here we see two CFs inserted. This is a dual version on both IDE channels we can use a CF. We used two 8 GB SanDisk Ultra II flash memories. This is CF v2.0, we should see roughly 15 MB/sec performance.

After we inserted 2x 8 GB CF flash cards into the adapter, we  insert it into the IDE port. We can't run them in raid (unless your mainboard controller would support it) yet 2x8 GB is a pretty good beginning. After a power-on we immediately notice that we have two new HD's each 8 GB available in the BIOS, lovely it works.

I'm still shattered by the fact I do not hear a drive purring. For our test I decided to quickly install an operating system on the SSD we have now activated to see if we'd run into any boot block issues. It's not the case, I have installed FreeBSD (Unix based) on the flash with a boot loader. Runs fine. With some traditional FreeBSD disk commands we can now see what the performance of the SSD is like. Since we can't manage RAID over the controller used, we now test the 8 GB SSD we made.

We see that device ad8 is nicely installed 8195604480 (7.6G) available, let's do a measurement with diskinfo -t /dev/. It's a great little utility. Anyway, like any other benchmark result, take it with a grain of salt. But I like how it shows you the seek times, too and the information for different parts of the disk.

Quite amazing, look at the seek-times .. you do not have any mechanical components inside your "HD" any longer. So the seek times are just stunning. Overall performance for a cheap CF card didn't suck either at roughly 15 MB/sec, though that's far away from traditional HDD perofrmance.

There's another trick we can do to check performance though, and fire off a disk-load check:

We run a "dd if=/dev/of=/dev/null bs=32k count=20000"; basically we make the SDD read/write 20.000 32k sized files and measure how long it takes to complete it. The results: 655360000 bytes transferred in 45.402010 secs (14434603 bytes/sec). As you can see again that is roughly 14-15MB/sec. Not that bad, not astonishing either.

Idea: this setup would actually make a nice silent swap file in windows ! Let's do the math; we purchased the CF-IDE converter for 15 EUR and 55 EUR for the "Ultra 2" model SanDisk CF card. Grand total .. we have a SDD drive for 70 EUR. But with 32 GB CF flashes at 150 EUR, this entire setup sounds more plausible. But let's up it a notch and try the nifty looking CF RAID controller.