Solid-state drives (or SSDs) are becoming increasingly popular nowadays, due to the fact that they provide relatively high storage capacities, as well as a very high degree of reliability and shock-resistance, especially for mobile or portable applications. However, said storage solutions are generally quite expensive (after all, they're the latest innovations in the field of storage) and this is the reason why the people over at Addonics came up with a PCI adapter that can add as many as four Compact Flash (CF) cards to any system with RAID redundancy support, allowing for the development of a low-priced, yet very effective SSD device.

The Addonics Quad CF PCI adapter (part number AD4CFPRJ) is the company's latest solution for creating a low cost large capacity SSD (solid state drive). The adapter fits into any PCI slot, either standard height or low profile and allows as many as four Compact Flash media of any capacity to be used like an ordinary hard drive.

Moreover, the adapter includes built-in firmware, which allows the four CF cards to be configured as one large volume, four individual drives, or configured for redundancy with support for RAID 0 (Striped), RAID 1 (Mirrored) and RAID 10 (Mirrored Striped). With the increased capacity and lowering costs of flash media, replacing the hard drive with CF as a boot drive is now a viable alternative because CF offers lower power consumption and no moving parts. Moreover, the device supports not only CF Type I, but also the Type II and MicroDrive formats.

Furthermore, the adapter supports UDMA, DMA and PIO hard drive modes and is compatible with the most popular operating systems on the market, including here DOS, Windows 98/ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Vista and Linux kernel 2.4+ .

Quite surprisingly, the Addonics Quad CF PCI adapter retails for just around 50 US dollars (obviously, no memory cards included), which makes it quite an affordable solution for most DIY computer enthusiasts out there, who will be able to build their own SSDs or RAID arrays for some pretty affordable prices.

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