Do-It-Yourself: Build a 96 GB SSD Drive for Less than $450

Solid-state drives are gaining more and more popularity among notebook users, but their high sale price makes regular users stick to older HDD drives. However, you can now enjoy the benefits of using flash-based storage while keeping the budget low with the DIY Century Compact Flash to SATA adapter.

A similar approach was presented a while ago, but the new offering from Century comes with extra features. The device is a Compact Flash to SATA adapter which now supports 2 GB to 2 TB cards, despite the fact that, as far as we know, there are no 2 TB Compact Flash cards.

This is a welcome update, given the fact that previous versions would only let users connect the adapter to an IDE interface. SATA-II interconnects come with increased data transfer rates that can theoretically reach speeds of about 3 Gbps. In fact, the main purpose users switch to solid-state drives is the enhanced data transfer rate over the conventional HDDs, and connecting a SSD unit to a IDE interface merely does not make sense.

Moreover, the DIY Century Compact Flash to SATA adatper now supports 3x CF cards, for a total of 96GB of solid-state storage at an estimative price of $450, provided that you already have the adapter. If you also have to purchase the device, you should add up about $200 extra, but this is way cheaper than purchasing a genuine 64 GB SSD for more than $1000.

If you plan to upgrade your SSD, you'll have to pay everything from scratch, memory chips and mechanisms included. When using the CF to SATA adapter, you merely have to swap the memory cards alone to get your desired storage capacity. More than that, you can scale the device anywhere between 2 GB and 2 TB each time you're running out of space.