Poor man’s SSD

I hope your fingers are limber and ready for some exercise, because this next post is either going to infuriate you and trigger all kinds of keyboard action, or get you so wired to reply that you’ll fall into spasms from trying to punch at the “Leave a comment” button.

First, a question: What’s this?

If you said, “An 8Gb CF memory card,” you’re right. Now here’s another one for you:

If you said, “A CF-to-2.5-inch-IDE adapter,” you’re right again. Give yourself a cookie.

Now if you can imagine where this is going, then you’re probably already seconds away from those spasms I just mentioned. But a little history first.

Way back in October, when I went on a short vacation and gallivanted all around the world with a Pentium laptop, I suffered a rather noisy and very unfortunate hard drive crash. In the time that I had remaining away from home, I thought about investing in a solid state drive, but there are two big shortcomings for me: size and price.

Price, because I don’t like dumping US$200 into a 14-year-old computer. I would be spending almost 20 times the value of the machine on a fairly-new technology that hasn’t really settled into a stable price bracket to start with. Pecuniary prudence prevented it. 😉

And size, because to be honest, I don’t need anything in the 200Gb range in a console-based laptop that I only use for writing, scheduling, surfing, e-mail, note-taking, chatting, gaming, troubleshooting, experimenting, blogging, organizing, planning, making presentations, calculating, reviewing and more experimenting, and a few other small things. 😈 In fact, there’s nothing that I do that would require 20Gb, let alone 200.

So paying a lot of money for a giant sized drive that probably wouldn’t even boot in a BIOS this old would be throwing bad money after good. I’d do just as well with a teensy 10Gb drive, provided it was reasonably fast. And cheap. And light. And didn’t eat a lot of power. And wasn’t hot. And wasn’t noisy.

Well hey, SSDs aren’t much different from giant memory cards. And CF cards are two or three generations removed from state-of-the-art, so they’re pretty cheap. Heck, I can get an 8Gb card off amazon.co.jp for around US$20, and the connector is only US$14. …

“And that is how I got to where I find myself today.”

I’m US$34 poorer now, and just about everyone who heard about my plan pooh-poohed it as a ridiculous idea, that CF cards would degrade over time, that the IO drag would be a nightmare, that bad luck would follow me like the plague … pretty much everything short of biblical catastrophe would ensue.

But even Wikipedia mentions this combination as an alternative to SSDs. And the XO-1 shipped with NAND flash as standard, although what you see there is just your common ordinary garden-variety CF card, intended for cameras and whatnot.

And really, I think the pros far outweigh the cons. Weight is negligible. Noise level is absolute zero. Speed is on par with the 40Gb 5400rpm drive I usually use in the Pentium. Heat is nil. Power draw is next to nil. And mechanical issues, which drove me to this end in the first place, are next to nil.

Moreover, I consider this an experiment: If it falls to pieces after a few hours, so be it. I lost roughly US$30 and learned something about the way these things work. I would much rather that, than lose US$200 to a drive that didn’t like my BIOS and collected dust in the closet. I’m willing to take a chance.

In the mean time, I’m going to sit back, relax, count and recount the US$175 or so I saved on a full size SSD plus shipping, and imagine how I shall waste that money. 😈