DIY SSD Guide

by Kevin O'Brien

Solid state disks (SSDs) are a flash-based memory storage device that carries an insane price premium in the current market. They will usually cost $600 to $1,000 as an upgrade from the manufacturer or computer parts store, making them outside the price range of many consumers. A new cheaper (slightly slower) option is available thanks to low-cost, high-capacity flash cards. This option is using a cheap compact flash to SATA adapter, and purchasing a moderately fast memory card that would fill your storage needs.

For this review I aimed to keep the price less than $100 just to show how affordable this option could be.

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Specifications of the SATA adapter and Compact flash cards used for this review:

Addonics CF To SATA HDD Adapter

• Enable Compact Flash (CFI/II) or Micro DriveTM to be used like ordinary 2.5" SATA hard drive
• Mounts directly onto notebook 2.5" SATA connector
• CF Card can be the primary bootable device containing the OS and applications.
• Transparent to the operating system and does not require any drivers
• Supports DMA and Ultra DMA modes (only on flash media card with such features).
• Compatible with DOS, Windows 3.1, NT4, 98SE, Me, 2000, XP, Vista, Mac, Linux
• Price $30 (available here)

Trancend 4GB 266x Compact Flash

• Capacity 4GB
• Speed 266X (40MB/sec Max)
• Support IDE PIO mode 6, Ultra DMA mode 4
• Compliant with the CF4.0 specification
• Built-in hardware ECC technology
• Built-in ATA interface for easy Plug and Play interoperability
• Lower power consumption
• Price $60

Kingston 4GB 133x Compact Flash

• Speed - 25MB/sec. read, 20MB/sec. write
• Standardized - complies with CompactFlash Association specification standards
• Economical - autosleep mode preserves system battery life
• Price $40 (Free after rebate)

Sandisk Ultra II 512MB Compact Flash

• Minimum of 10MB/second sequential read speed for ultra-fast image viewing and data transfer
• Minimum 9MB/second sequential write speed lets you capture large image files faster
• Low power consumption for longer battery life
• Price Free, old flash laying around

Setup

One nice perk of these types of devices is they don't require any drivers to work on any system. There are a few requirements though; the system must have SATA, and the compact flash card must support DMA modes. Some older flash cards will have problems, but since 4GB to 16GB flash cards didn't economically exist a few years ago, this should not be a problem.

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Installing the operating system was the only other setup required for this review, and it follows the same installation process as any other Windows XP install process. If you are wondering why I didn't pick Vista, our review budget limited us to 4GB cards that were fast enough to compete against a standard hard drive. If you move your budget up $50 or $100 more, you will open yourself up to 8GB and larger cards that would be fine for installing Vista.

Performance

Now you are probably wondering what the performance difference is between a standard 7200rpm drive, true SSD, and my DIY SSD. For this review I cover those three drives, as well as a handful of others to give you the best idea of what to expect.

The first lineup of benchmarks comparison use the software PerformanceTest, and the included disk test. As you can see, the DIY SSD performs quite well, even outperforming a true SSD found in the Sony VAIO TZ.

Disk Speed	Apple MacBook Air 4200 rpm 1.8" HD	1.8" SSD in Sony TZ	DIY SSD	7200 rpm 2.5" HD	Memoright 128GB SATA SSD
Sequential Read	16.3	27.7	30.1	40.9	37.7
Sequential Write	22.7	13.4	21.0	38.0	60.3
Random Seek + RW	1.28	1.21	1.44	2.97	3.55
Disk Mark	145.7	153.0	189.9	295.9	367.2
PassMark Rating	29.1	30.6	38.9	59.2	73.4

For HDTune, we included more drives into the comparison, including multiple types of compact flash card to show you how much speed can vary between cards. (Note: Not all compact flash cards are made equal, and the old 512MB Sandisk card has very poor access times.)

MacBook Air:

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Sony TZ SSD:

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5400 rpm HD:

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Kingston CF:

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Trancend CF:

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Sandisk CF:

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7200 rpm HD:

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32GB Memoright SSD:

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128GB Memoright SSD:

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PCMark05 benchmarks:
(Higher scores mean better performance)

• Lenovo T60 2.16GHz w/ 7200rpm XP: 4816
• Lenovo T60 2.16GHz w/ DIY SSD XP: 3930

I figure the main difference between these two scores is the 7200rpm drive has a much faster disk transfer rate. Still, if you violently shake a notebook with a standard hard drive while it's accessing the drive you will kill the drive. You can violently shake a DIY SSD and nothing will happen.

Power Consumption

With the DIY SSD, I was expecting at least a little less power draw, but nothing was found in my use. Idle power draw was around 15.3w for both the 7200rpm drive, and the DIY SSD. Chances are the $30 adapter has nowhere near the power efficiency levels that a true SSD would have.

Conclusion

With this review I was planning on showing a proof of concept that it was possible to make your own SSD and didn't expect that it would provide such great real world results. While many very pricey performance SSDs exist, the module I assembled had greater speeds than the SSD found in an off the shelf notebook at a fraction of the price. If you are on a budget and need an option for a notebook that sees very rough duty, or you just like snappy boot times you may want to check this out.

Pros

• MUCH cheaper compared to any other SSD solution
• You pick the flash module you trust most
• Very small overall size compared to 2.5" drives

Cons

• Not as fast as a 7200rpm drive or a performance SSD
• No gain in battery life

 

Interesting read.

Any concern about read/write cycles using these type of cards as a disk?

 

Kind of useless me thinks?...its does not gain you any better life..yet it isnt faster than a 7200rpm drive, and more expensive($1/gb for top 7200 drive)...ssd more. Only thing good would i guess be less weight(i hope a 2.5in drive weights you down lol), sound, and vibration, I dont really see the point in getting this.. I think we will have to weight for real SSD's to come down in price.

 

Nice guide. SSD on the cheap.

The thing that bugs me the most about SSD's is the small size. You pay a hefty price for 64Gb or less when you shop by Dell for example. I know from experience 64Gb can be filled quite quickly nowadays if you have a lot of games, software and files.
The DIY SSD solves the money problem for the most part, but the size remains the issue, at least for me. I like a roomy HDD.

 

Less weight, less space, less heat, no vibration issues. It was a proof of concept really to show that it could be done, and it ended up having decent results. Car mounted notebooks for example would enjoy this type of setup.

 

The only problem here is that the biggest flash-based CF card available is only 16Gb. I'm sure there are MicroDrives that are bigger, but they're much slower and less reliable (they're essentially Mechanical Hard Drives mounted in a CF Type II case).

 

The concern that might be had is the life of the flashdrive being used. The reason for the lifespan of ssds is held within the circuitboard/controller which assures equal wear levelling of each cell in use. This cannot be done with a flash drive.

 

Nice review! Exactly what I was wondering about. Did you install XP on these? How did the DIY-SSD feel compared to 7200rpm HDD? On my desktop, I have a SCSI HDD that runs 15000rpm, and the seek time is excellent, but transfer speeds are a little slower compared to regular 7200rpm SATA HDD. With your DIY-SSD, does the seek time help any at all for booting up, and running programs?

I heard that running XP on a CF(or any flash card) drive will eventually kill the drive because of the virtual memory (swap) that keeps on writing and erasing, wearing out the media in couple days. Are you planning to do an extensive test to see if the media fails? I also have the Kingston 4GB, I think I got the same deal as yours ^^

If one didn't care much about vibration or shock, would you still recommend DIY-SSD?

 

Great idea , If you want a cheap adapter to try it out try:
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.8466 for £7 with free shipping.

But like the previous poster , This is gonna fail pretty quickly because of read/write cycles , If you put your pagefile on a seperate disk it should be ok for a while.

 

You don't have to have a pagefile at all in Windows ... unless you're running a notebook with 256MB or 512MB of system RAM. That's a non issue.

 

The size remains the dealbreaker for me. 16Gb isn't enough room for all my stuff. Even if I clean up alot. 64Gb could be enough. But at that premium I'd just buy a huge regular HDD and save some cash in the proces.

SSD needs to age a bit more. Given a couple of years prices will come down and the size will increase. The same happened with memorycards. A couple of year back you'd pay a fortune for a 1Gb stick, now they're cheap and huge. At least for a digital camera or a PSP.

 

"Endurance : 1,000,000 times or cycles"

(1) 100,000 write cycles = (40MB/s * 60 sec/min * 60 min/hr * 24 hr/day) / (365 days/year) = 1.27 years

(2) 1,000,000 write cycles = 5.1 years


While it might not be as high as an SSD, we are still talking years before any issues crop up.

EDIT: I should mention that I use USB flash sticks for ReadyBoost (really cheap noname ones) which is basically a swap file on the flash memory. I have been doing this for about 2 months now on a daily basis without problems.

 

I wouldn't call it "useless." You're forgetting this DIY SSD is technically faster than the "real" SSD in a Sony VAIO TZ. If you've got a cheap notebook that you want to use as a take-everywhere travel companion then this is a great option because you can beat your notebook up and not have to worry about HD failure. Plus, as CF capacity increases you can "upgrade" this DIY SSD just by inserting a new card.

 

the website linked appears to have a dual-CF adapter for those with an IDE harddrive connection in their laptop

http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/ad44midecf.asp

that plus some 32 gig CF sticks would get you up to 64gig. I'm not seeing any announcements for upcoming dual CF adapters for SATA, but it might be worth emailing them about.

Does anyone know when Samsung will be mass-releasing the 64 gig CF cards? or if anyone else is developing them?

 

On a 17 inch laptop that had a option for duel drives, you use a DIY SSD and a regular HDD, putting the OS on the DIY SSD and files on the HDD. Of course you could just get two 7200 RPM HDDs run them in RAID.

 

Well the thing with CF>IDE is its practically the same interface to begin with. Easy to work with, very little circuitry. With SATA you need the SATA to IDE interface for both cards, more space required, less likely to fit the same stuff into the same about of space.

If you notice, it is also going as master/slave. SATA doesnt have the same dual drive per channel ability.

Running a few additional benchmarks for the different drives, now with ATTO since that tests R/W a bit better. Here is the 128, I will add on the various CF cards in a couple of hours.

 

Nice work Kev. I guess it is a cheap alternative and something to play around with.

SSDs are still in their infancy in the consumer market and I predict we may see some big announcements during this quarter, one to include price drops. As much as I believed the manufacturers were making tons, its not entirely true when they are still paying $10-12 GB for their memory before production.

We need to also find resellers that arent relying on a 50%-90% profit in the resale to help out (hint hint)

 

Yea when I spoke with the Samsung flash division leader, he commented on how price drops are going to be pretty insane with right now compared with this year christmas. Flash prices are dropping like a rock as they become easier to produce.

 

I did this about a month ago using my Thinkpad X40 following the directions over on this thread at the Thinkpad Forums. I highly recommend doing this mod if you've got an older computer laying around.

A few very basic things to to think about from both the Thinkpads thread and my own experience...
First, the ideal operating system for this deployment appears to be an nLite shrunk XP w/ the enhanced write filter (EWF) from XP Embedded. Using nLite to shrink your XP size is a no-brainer and has been well-covered almost every forum you look at . The EWF prevents writes to the protected volume. Instead of writing to the disk, files get written to a RAM overlay, which is cleared after each shutdown. This does two things: (1) reduces the wear -read: limited writes - on the CF and (2) increases security by preventing malicious changes to the system.
Second is stay away from Transcend cards. Many users on the Thinkpads thread have found them to be unreliable and their speeds to be well below the average. The general recommendation is to use either a Sandisk Extreme IV or a Lexar X300. While these cards may cost more, they naturally support UDMA-4, which is much faster than anything else. Also, if you plan on purchasing either of these cards, buy it from an authorized retailer b/c there are tons of fakes floating around eBay. There is a huge speed and quality difference.
The last thing I've got to say is to have patience with the process. It took me a long while to get the nLite installation under 550mb, but it was well worth it .
I hope this post helps. If anyone wants some advice on doing it, just PM me and I'll try to help

 

wait so the x-axis is how full the drive is?

so a 7200rpm is actually slower when almost full than a 5200rpm that's equally as full (i guess on average...kind of generic graphs)

 

Heh I was about to mention that too.

NewEgg 16GB CF (A-DATA for $56, Transcend 133X for $77)

NewEgg 32GB CF (A-DATA for $135, Transcend 133X for $160)

 

I'm interested in knowing if anyone actually encountered a flash drive that is "worn out"? Much like CPU's are supposed to degrade over time but by the time it actually does, it's hopelessly obsolete.

 

Is the hard drive in the SONY TZ a PATA or a SATA?
What size is it?

Andrew

 

Very interesting idea and approach to use a SATA adapter and CF card. Something to keep in mind.

 

It is weird that the TZ's SSD performed that slow. If I'm not wrong it is using the Samsung one where I had tested it before & it should not be that slow albeit it is 1.8" IDE (ZIF)

 

So, the TZ's is PATA?
Which of the Addonics adapters would work in the TZ?

Andrew

 

i'm not 100% sure, but i believe that the sony tz uses a 1.8" hd.....meaning that you won't be able to do this b/c the smallest adapter size is for 2.5".

 

I think you are right, it is a 4200rpm drive that is smaller than 2.5" for sure.
I thought it was some measurement in millimeters.

Andrew

 

Most 1.8" size is PATA

 

This is cool. I didn't think they made such a thing. I'd actually like to try it with some old IDE machines with 4200RPM drives. Is this the only company that makes these adapters? Or can I find something on Newegg? Also, do compact flash cards come in speeds faster than 266X?

Sorry if these were asked, I didn't read the thread

 

I wonder if you'd get better results with those high end SanDisk Ultra II stuff.

(Sorry if it was mentioned before, lulz)

 

Would Addonics by chance have something like this for 1.8" IDE drives? Its amazing how low cost this is for an SSD, and to think that with SSD a laptop can be shaken around and still work(!). Possible 'burn outs' are a real possibility, but those cards can be easily replaced. Best to do regular backups a different drive though, just in case.

 

http://www.ameri-rack.com/APA-CF18T_m.html

http://www.ameri-rack.com/APA-CF18Hm.htm

i found this for 1.8" hds....don't know how well it will work. want to give it a try, greg?

 

LOL. this is awesome! really cheap and a cool way to upgrade or downgrade ^^

what i love about SSDs, is the fact that you can shake it as violent as you want and the hard drive will not die, i really dont trust laptop harddrives because after alot of moving and shaking it will die. SSDs last a good long time and are tougher.

 

If Andrew were willing to cough up one (or both) and a large enough CF card for an XP installation, I'd do it .

 

We're already in talks with Kevin about a DIY SSD Part 2.

 

This sort of thing makes a lot of sense for people who have machines with 1.8" drives. Now if we could only get some 64GB CF cards...

I'm surprised that the performance of different CF cards wasn't tested, though. Read and write speeds can vary quite a bit between manufacturers regardless of the "rating" on their labels.

 

Now if only the addonics adapter were smaller, you could use this in an ipod!

 

Oh that is tempting. Two CF cards - I could easily get to 32GB which is enough for me when I'm in class and such, then just put a second HDD in my multi-bay when I need more space/other files. Hmm...how tempting!

 

Is it possible to put a IDE-to-SATA converter on that dual-CF?

And what about SDHC-to-CF?

All that converting would really hurt performance though, wouldn't it...

 

YES, it definitely would.

 

Here are some benchmarks pulled from other forums.

Toshiba 1GB CF
burst speed: 7.9 MB/s
random access: 2.1 ms
average read: 7.2 MB/s

SanDisk Extreme II 2GB
burst speed: 11.7 MB/s
random access: 1.3 ms
average read: 10.8 MB/s

SanDisk Extreme III 2GB
burst speed: 18.4 MB/s
random access: 1.4 ms
average read: 15.9 MB/s

Lexar 300x UDMA 8GB
Access Time : 0.5 ms
Burst Rate : 37.0 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 38.5 MB/sec

Toshiba 1.8" 20GB 4200 RPM HDD
burst speed: 19.6 MB/s
random access: 21.2 ms
average read: 13.2 MB/s

Hitachi 2.5" 30GB 4200 RPM HDD
burst speed: 32.1 MB/s
random access: 17.8 ms
average read: 21.4 MB/s

Western Digital 3.5" 500GB 7200 RPM HDD
burst speed: 192.3 MB/s
random access: 13.5 ms
average read: 70.6 MB/s

 

wow talk about a timely thread. I'm doing lots of research on this myself right now.

You guys have to consider a few things, SSD's are great mostly for 2 things:
- solidity: flash memory has no moving parts and won't break under shock
- seek time: no moving parts = instant seek.

Read speeds are quite fast, especially for random access (where you need to read lots of small files). I'm a part time musician, am looking to build myself a laptop for doing live gigs. I like the idea of having a laptop which can endure shocks and not freak out. Also the typical use is for reading sample (.wav) files, typically many small random files. Lets say I have an "virtual" instrument which is a piano. Typically every key I play is a different sample file / place on the disk and so there's lots of quick / random loading to be done from the disk. I don't plan to record using this machine or do little recording so there's not much writing that will be done to the disk. I have no proof yet but I think a SSD would be perfectly suited for this kind of use.

For the CF cards, be sure to look at the speed rating (40x, 133x, 266x, 300x). I think they refer to the read speed, which is typically faster than write speed (sometimes by a big factor like 2:1 or even 3:1, not sure why though). These translate to a given MB/s speed directly, for example 133x is supposed to be 19.5MB/s, 266x is 39MB/s and 300x is 44MB/s (1x = 150kb/s). Don't be fooled by size & price alone, some manufacturers like A-DATA sell really slow cards (those "speedy" ones are 40x, NOT really speedy... the "turbo" ones are 266x though) so size isn't the only thing to look for. The "sweet spot" seems to be 266x 8GB cards right now, not too expensive and fast enough. Or 16GB @ 133x, if you'd rather have more size than speed.

One thing that would be nice is to be able to RAID two such CF cards, but it doesn't look like the adapter from Addonics can do that (see here: http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/ad44midecf.asp ). Though I'm not completely sure about this, I am not familiar with RAID stuff. If so, I'd go for two 133x for 16GB and RAID them, otherwise I'd go for an 8GB 266x card instead.

I found a few resources for educating yourself on all the speed jargon and card types:
http://www.hjreggel.net/cardspeed/speed-cards.html
http://www.hjreggel.net/cardspeed/info-cards.html

Someone mentioned SDHC, but it doesn't look like the speeds are competitive. Apparently this is due to their architecture, they are small and hence have a smaller bus for data transfer (to put it simply). There's some blurb on this topic here (and other interesting info about speeds, etc):
http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/digital/compact_flash_memory_cards.html

Another thing to consider is that some SSDs are not so expensive, I found one from M-Tron 16GB which sells for about 400$:
http://www.king-cart.com/cgi-bin/ca...TRON+MOBI+2.5+16GB+SATA+SSD&exact_match=exact
That is supposed to be one of the best SSDs out there. It trumps the CF cards with an equivalent of 682x (100MB/s) !! Consider that it may not be worth all the trouble too (the DIY project).

There's a great tutorial on how to setup your PC to boot off a CF card on Addonics' own website:
http://www.addonics.com/support/faqs/faq-bootcf.asp

Obviously disabling the page file probably is a must, as there's no need to "page" anything anymore if you have sufficient RAM (say 1G or more) & since disk reading should be fast enough. Write speeds are slow so you want to avoid as much unnecessary writing to the disk.

Ideally I'd like to have both, hard disk and SSD. One idea I had is to try and find some external storage alternative, like a USB key or an Express card. In particular, Corsair has a 16GB key which can achieve about 30MB/s read speed and I was able to find it on sale for 100$, sweet deal considering that's roughly 200x in CF equivalent speed. That's the best $/GB/speed deal I've found so far... And it would allow me to still keep the laptop's original HD, perhaps to combine the best of both worlds. Here's a review on this key:
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/01/23/monster-sized-usb-sticks-reviewed

 

SSD and flash media do die, however. USB drives and Compact Flash/SD cards will cruise along and then suddenly refuse to format, for whatever reason.
Do we know why this occurs?

Andrew

 

on the website i posted above, they did have an adapter for use in ipods.

 

Great post. To build off your point, those cheaper card make reach 266x speeds; however, those are maximum rather than the average or minimum sustained read speed. When you put down money for sandisk extreme or lexar, you pay for that consistency. People who do embedded work with CF cards recommend shelling out the extra cash. Also, if you're looking for a deal on quality cards, Sandisk has a MIR deal going on: http://66.223.110.241/rebates/SanDiskQ1VisaPromo033008.pdf
That promotion is what made me pull the trigger on my setup.

Speaking of which, here are benchmarks of my extreme iv card, which I'm using for the OS and all apps (except Trillian).

 

Out of intrest, how long does the system take to boot with the cf card?

 

Me too! However, I'm curious as to whether this USB stick will really be faster than my 5400rpm drive? It would be extra handy to be able to use a USB stick when I wanted speed and my 5400rpm drive when I dont care.

 

I found a Biwin 16GB compact flash card rated at 300x read and 150x write for $60 + shipping. Has anyone had any experiences with this company?

CF/IDE adaptor are going for about $5.

For $65 you can have a fast 16GB SSD.

I wouldn't mind swapping my 40GB 1.8" 4200rpm drive with this. I'm sure it will be faster...

 

I see how it is...get him to do all the DIY stuff that may potentially destroy the office eh?