DIY SSD Guide

[The_Punisher]

The size remains the dealbreaker for me. 16Gb isn't enough room for all my stuff. Even if I clean up alot. 64Gb could be enough. But at that premium I'd just buy a huge regular HDD and save some cash in the proces.

SSD needs to age a bit more. Given a couple of years prices will come down and the size will increase. The same happened with memorycards. A couple of year back you'd pay a fortune for a 1Gb stick, now they're cheap and huge. At least for a digital camera or a PSP.

[dietcokefiend]

The concern that might be had is the life of the flashdrive being used. The reason for the lifespan of ssds is held within the circuitboard/controller which assures equal wear levelling of each cell in use. This cannot be done with a flash drive.

Nice review! Exactly what I was wondering about. Did you install XP on these? How did the DIY-SSD feel compared to 7200rpm HDD? On my desktop, I have a SCSI HDD that runs 15000rpm, and the seek time is excellent, but transfer speeds are a little slower compared to regular 7200rpm SATA HDD. With your DIY-SSD, does the seek time help any at all for booting up, and running programs?

I heard that running XP on a CF(or any flash card) drive will eventually kill the drive because of the virtual memory (swap) that keeps on writing and erasing, wearing out the media in couple days. Are you planning to do an extensive test to see if the media fails? I also have the Kingston 4GB, I think I got the same deal as yours ^^

If one didn't care much about vibration or shock, would you still recommend DIY-SSD?

Great idea , If you want a cheap adapter to try it out try:
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.8466 for £7 with free shipping.

But like the previous poster , This is gonna fail pretty quickly because of read/write cycles , If you put your pagefile on a seperate disk it should be ok for a while.

"Endurance : 1,000,000 times or cycles"

(1) 100,000 write cycles = (40MB/s * 60 sec/min * 60 min/hr * 24 hr/day) / (365 days/year) = 1.27 years

(2) 1,000,000 write cycles = 5.1 years


While it might not be as high as an SSD, we are still talking years before any issues crop up.

EDIT: I should mention that I use USB flash sticks for ReadyBoost (really cheap noname ones) which is basically a swap file on the flash memory. I have been doing this for about 2 months now on a daily basis without problems.

[Jerry Jackson]

Kind of useless me thinks?...its does not gain you any better life..yet it isnt faster than a 7200rpm drive, and more expensive($1/gb for top 7200 drive)...ssd more. Only thing good would i guess be less weight(i hope a 2.5in drive weights you down lol), sound, and vibration, I dont really see the point in getting this.. I think we will have to weight for real SSD's to come down in price.

I wouldn't call it "useless." You're forgetting this DIY SSD is technically faster than the "real" SSD in a Sony VAIO TZ. If you've got a cheap notebook that you want to use as a take-everywhere travel companion then this is a great option because you can beat your notebook up and not have to worry about HD failure. Plus, as CF capacity increases you can "upgrade" this DIY SSD just by inserting a new card.

[timswar]

the website linked appears to have a dual-CF adapter for those with an IDE harddrive connection in their laptop

http://www.addonics.com/products/fla...ad44midecf.asp

that plus some 32 gig CF sticks would get you up to 64gig. I'm not seeing any announcements for upcoming dual CF adapters for SATA, but it might be worth emailing them about.

Does anyone know when Samsung will be mass-releasing the 64 gig CF cards? or if anyone else is developing them?

[ChristopherAKAO4]

On a 17 inch laptop that had a option for duel drives, you use a DIY SSD and a regular HDD, putting the OS on the DIY SSD and files on the HDD. Of course you could just get two 7200 RPM HDDs run them in RAID.

[dietcokefiend]

Well the thing with CF>IDE is its practically the same interface to begin with. Easy to work with, very little circuitry. With SATA you need the SATA to IDE interface for both cards, more space required, less likely to fit the same stuff into the same about of space.

If you notice, it is also going as master/slave. SATA doesnt have the same dual drive per channel ability.

Running a few additional benchmarks for the different drives, now with ATTO since that tests R/W a bit better. Here is the 128, I will add on the various CF cards in a couple of hours.

[Les]

Nice work Kev. I guess it is a cheap alternative and something to play around with.

SSDs are still in their infancy in the consumer market and I predict we may see some big announcements during this quarter, one to include price drops. As much as I believed the manufacturers were making tons, its not entirely true when they are still paying $10-12 GB for their memory before production.

We need to also find resellers that arent relying on a 50%-90% profit in the resale to help out (hint hint)

[dietcokefiend]

Nice work Kev. I guess it is a cheap alternative and something to play around with.

SSDs are still in their infancy in the consumer market and I predict we may see some big announcements during this quarter, one to include price drops. As much as I believed the manufacturers were making tons, its not entirely true when they are still paying $10-12 GB for their memory before production.

Yea when I spoke with the Samsung flash division leader, he commented on how price drops are going to be pretty insane with right now compared with this year christmas. Flash prices are dropping like a rock as they become easier to produce.

[AChufong]

I did this about a month ago using my Thinkpad X40 following the directions over on this thread at the Thinkpad Forums. I highly recommend doing this mod if you've got an older computer laying around.

A few very basic things to to think about from both the Thinkpads thread and my own experience...
First, the ideal operating system for this deployment appears to be an nLite shrunk XP w/ the enhanced write filter (EWF) from XP Embedded. Using nLite to shrink your XP size is a no-brainer and has been well-covered almost every forum you look at . The EWF prevents writes to the protected volume. Instead of writing to the disk, files get written to a RAM overlay, which is cleared after each shutdown. This does two things: (1) reduces the wear -read: limited writes - on the CF and (2) increases security by preventing malicious changes to the system.
Second is stay away from Transcend cards. Many users on the Thinkpads thread have found them to be unreliable and their speeds to be well below the average. The general recommendation is to use either a Sandisk Extreme IV or a Lexar X300. While these cards may cost more, they naturally support UDMA-4, which is much faster than anything else. Also, if you plan on purchasing either of these cards, buy it from an authorized retailer b/c there are tons of fakes floating around eBay. There is a huge speed and quality difference.
The last thing I've got to say is to have patience with the process. It took me a long while to get the nLite installation under 550mb, but it was well worth it .
I hope this post helps. If anyone wants some advice on doing it, just PM me and I'll try to help

[Nolan.Rivers]

wait so the x-axis is how full the drive is?

so a 7200rpm is actually slower when almost full than a 5200rpm that's equally as full (i guess on average...kind of generic graphs)