Solid State Disks are all the rage right now for their low seek time, high IOPS ratings and low power consumption. However, they cost an arm and a leg at the moment. NewEgg charges $675 for their cheapest 64GB STA device, which works out to be $10.50/gb. Their cheapest 32GB drive is $359.00, which is $11.21/gb.

You can’t currently buy 64GB CompactFlash cards (or, I haven’t seen any) but you can get 32GB cards for $127.00 each. So, a CF->SATA adapter is $31.99 from addonics, which yeilds $158.99 for a 32GB drvice – not bad at just under half the price. I haven’t actually ordered any of this – it’s all just speculation – but if you were to use this as a slog or a cache device for a relativley slow ZFS array, you could probably get a decent speed boost.

You can of course go with an CF->IDE adapter, if you have free IDE ports laying around, the adapters are $22.99. This makes a 32 GB SSD cost $149.99 – which is $5 under Transcend’s IDE SSD, which isn’t nearly as appealing. At that price, I’d probably just get the pre-built one and be done with it.

Remember with all of this, if you have extra CF cards laying around, you might be able to work out some of this even cheaper.