Make your own SSD for less than £20

Fancy experimenting with an SSD, but can't afford one? Josh Blodwell shows you how to make a silent and robust storage drive on the cheap.

While CF cards may be slower than a standard hard drive, they're quieter, cooler and more robust than a traditional hard drive. This makes them perfect for use in low-performance tasks that demand such a device, such as storing your GPS software and maps on an in-car computer.

To compare the speeds of the solid-state system with those of a standard hard drive, we performed read and write tests, copying 3GB of data between a fast S-ATA drive and our test drives. One drive was our solid-state CF system, and the other was an old but reliable 120GB Western Digital 7,200rpm hard disk.

As we expected, transfer times for the CF system were much higher than those of the hard disk. Transferring the files to the traditional drive took only one minute and 19 seconds, whereas the CF drive took six minutes and 27 seconds to write the same files. Reading was a similar story, with the traditional drive taking one minute and 31 seconds to transfer the data, compared to seven minutes and 15 seconds for the CF drive. However, these speeds could be further improved with a faster CF card and more recent converter.