Good power savings, silence, less performance, less space sums it up.

I put in this less expensive little jem. An 8GB model from Transcend. Its read and write speeds are slow but its power consumption is fantastic. Using RMClock to run my Pentium M Banias at ULV levels I get the following before and after figures. The hard drive is a 2.5" 7200RPM 100GB Hitatchi Travelstar.

Travelstar: Screen off @ idle: 9 watts. Screen on @ idle: 15 watts. Screen on & CPUBurn: 19 watts. Screen on, CPUBurn, & HDTach: 21 watts.
Transcend: Screen off @ idle: 8 watts. Screen on @ idle: 14 watts. Screen on & CPUBurn: 18 watts. Screen on, CPUBurn, & HDTach: 19 watts.

If you're really pushed for battery life it could be a big help. I'm tickled because I managed to get my laptop to consume less power @ max load than my previous desktop system's 15" 20 watt LCD monitor alone.

Great work mate, one day soon I'd love to do this.

When you say speeds are slow, do you mean really bad or just noticeable?

FLash SSD's are supposed to have much better seek times than regular hard drives, and in many cases the seek times matter much more than transfer speeds.

8GB is enough to get by with (4GB is enough for windows XP and programs). If you add a NAS on gigabit ethernet you can have as much high speed, high capacity storage that you need. only while at home with your NAS of course.

The data sheet gives pretty low performance figures for this drive. I'm thinking of getting their 266x CF unit (datasheet) which they state can operate in UDMA 4 in fixed IDE mode and a CF-ATA adapter for my new house server box. It should be pretty comparable to a HDD in performance, utterly silent, low power, etc.

I don't have any test figures to meaningfully quantify the difference, but in simple terms there are points where the system seems snappier. There are also areas where there is quite a bit of noticable lag compared to the Travelstar. Opening some programs is slower and booting is slower. Installing Windows XP was brutily slow. Formatting the drive was very quick. Interet Explorer seems a little snappier while openning pages.

Samsung apparently has an SSD with quite a bit better performance.

Compact flash certianly offers more affordable options and I suppose there might be compact flash adapters suitable for laptops but I'd do some good checking ahead of time.

You'll want to check the power figures on that Compact Flash as well. At least if power consumption is a concern.

The data sheet Flandry linked indicates 500 m amp @ 5 volts. That's 2.5 watts - simular to a laptop drive. You'd also have to consider the adaptor's power consumption, which I don't have a clue what they would consume. Maybe next to nothing? Maybe a watt or two?

You can see both in the data sheet for the Transcend SSD and in the power test results that the SSD erased most of the Travelstar's power consumption. Admittedly, though, at a loss in both space and speed.

Cool, well for normal laptop use the speed should be acceptable, but I'm not so sure about putting this kind in a PC, especially since your experience mirrors a review made regarding the 32 gb model on Newegg, posted by some guy.

"...took over 2 hours to install Windows XP, several hours to install SP2, and I am now giving up after several hours of attempting various tweaks to get the advertised speed out of the drive."

As for PCs, at least the Samsungs' prices seem to have come down quite a bit already.

I think anyone looking for a performance drive, even in a laptop, should look the other way. I don't have the same model as "Some Guy" in the user review, but my experience is the same as his with HDTach, about 20 MB/s sequential. Everyday use that isn't hard drive intense doesn't really suffer that much. I definately wouldn't want to install or update XP every day though.

There's really no reason for a CF form factor to take more power than a SSD. If anything, i would expect it to draw less. I think the only difference between the SSD and the 266 card is that the SSD uses slower chips -- it's comparable with the 133x or maybe even a slower card offered by Transcend.

Anyway, the adapter has 0 power draw--CF is an ATA device that simply needs a suitable connector. There is nothing but wires in the adapter.

Addonics makes adapters that plug directly into a laptop PATA connector and fits right into a laptop, in fact, they make an adapter that takes two CF cards. Here's a review of the basic adapter.

I only caution people to check carefully that the adaptors are suitable. The one you link, for instance, does not appear suitable for either laptop I own. Both of mine secure the drive within the laptop using the screw holes on the side of the drive. The adaptor appears to lack those mounting holes.

You can also see that there are electronics on those adaptors. They are not like adapting 2.5" ATA to 3.5" ATA, which is just wire. Nevertheless, I think it'd be fantastic if someone could test these and see what if any measurable power consumption the adaptors add. Compact Flash is much less expensive than SSD.

I'm only going by the specs I read regarding power usage. According to them, there is significant differences even among SSD's.

I hope anyone using CF has some software that can simulate wear levelling, otherwise it might not last very long before you get bad sectors.

Any idea why their OS installs were so slow?

I have been using an IDE-flash drive to house my OS for 3 1/2 years now. I installed 98 on a 800 MB Simpletech drive originally, and have more recently moved to a 2 GB PQI drive. Both installs were very quick with ~ 800 MB of data.

I was thinking of building a higher-powered system, and using this 16 GB Samsung - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820147020

I've read where you can get an XP install down to about 600 MB, which would leave tons of room for apps, and simple data files.

It might have something to do with random writes. Even the high performance flash based SSD's seem to do very poorly. The high performance models are supposed to be quite the upgrade over an HDD.

When I installed on mine it was definately slow, but no where near the hours mentioned in the user review. Updates were slower too, but again, no where near the hours described in the user review.