Build your own notebook flash drive

Further to yesterday’s entry about notebook flash drives, I forgot to mention the Addonics CF drive adapter. For $30, you get an adapter that plugs into your notebook’s IDE connector. Add a 16 GB compact flash card, and you have a solid state “hard drive” in your notebook. There’s also a dual CF adapter with a second CF slot, so you could have 32 GB. That doesn’t sound like much in today’s world of 160 GB notebook hard drives, but 32 GB is plenty for most needs–provided you don’t have 20 gigabytes of music files. Imagine what the reduced power consumption will do for your battery life.

At over $200 for a 16 GB CF card, this is still a bit too expensive for most people. But not terribly so, and not for much longer if flash memory prices continue to drop. I can almost guarantee that the next notebook computer I buy will have a compact flash storage device rather than a 2.5″ hard disk.