Thinking about swapping out that old fashioned hard drive in your netbook or laptop for a newfangled solid state disk, but don’t want to spend an arm and a leg? The Sans Digital CompactSTOR CS1T will turn any old CompactFlash card into a SSD. Sort of.

The CS1T is actually more of a CF card to 2.5″ hard drive adapter. You just pop a CF card up to 32GB into the device and you can plug it into any desktop or laptop computer that can handle a 2.5″ SATA hard drive. The adapter costs $40, and you can probably find a 32GB CompactFlash card for not much more.

You’re probably not going to get bleeding edge performance if you install an operating system or programs to the disk. But you do get some of the benefits of solid state memory including lower heat and power consumption than a typical hard drive. Also, since there are no moving parts, solid state disks run quieter and are less likely to suffer damage if you bump or drop your laptop.

via the gadgeteer

The Acer Aspire One may be one of the cheapest ultraportable laptops around, with prices starting at just $379. But it’s also one of the slower laptops on the market. The folks at the Acer Aspire One User forums have discovered the hard way that the SSD or solid state disk used by the Aspire One A110 has a slow read speed. That means that while the laptop offers decent performance with Linpus Linux Lite, Windows XP is pretty sluggish.

So what do you do if you’ve already dropped $400 on a laptop and don’t feel like trading up for another model? Disconnect the SSD, buy a speedy CompactFlash card and get a CF to ZIF adapter to throw into your laptop. At least that’s what forum member andy53 did.

He picked up a Transcend 300x CF card, which has aread speed of 44MB/s and a write speed of 22MB/s. That’s a bit faster than the read/write speeds you’d get from an Eee PC 900 and nearly twice the read speed and 4 times the write speed of the internal SSD that ships with the Acer Aspire One.

[via jkkmobile]