Traditional hard disk drives face a fierce competition from solid state drives these days, and all seems to favor the SSD technology. The new storage solutions offer more reliability and robustness and are also able to provide more performance compared to the spinning platters. They operate in silence, output almost no heat and offer faster read/write rates. Yet, that's not all, since SSDs also have lower power requirements which make them a great option for mobile machines greatly dependent on battery life.

SSDs would come with the disadvantage of featuring high prices and offer a relatively small capacity. Fortunately, capacities greater than 128GB start showing on the market. Sharkoon is now offering an alternative solution meant to allow users to create their own notebook SSDs.

Basically, what the company offers is an SSD adaptor which features the size and connectivity capabilities of a 2.5 inch SATA. The Sharkoon Flexi-Drive S2S allows for up to six SDHC cards to be installed in the enclosure, providing this way with the necessary flash memory. The solution gives a great advantage by allowing users to choose the manufacturer, number, chip type (SLC or MLC) and capacity of the memory cards according to their preferences and needs.

The memory cards are installed using Raid-0, which means that the performance of all cards is expected to be the same. Since the highest-capacity SDHC currently available features 32GB of storage space, a maximum of 192GB can be installed in the Flexi-Drive S2S. When running a test with HD-Tune on six 8GB SDHC memory cards with Class 6 speed ratings installed in the enclosure, they were able to provide 140 MB/s read speed and 115 MB/s write speed.

The Sharkoon Flexi-Drive S2S is available immediately at authorized retailers and features a suggested retail price of 9€ (99.5$). More information on the technology can be found on the manufacturer's site.