4GB Compact Flash cards with high read speed are becoming more affordable, the 8GB still seem to be relatively pricey. However, there are other solutions.

Addonics makes one of them. The Quad-CF PCI Controller allows you to combine 4 Compact Flash cards into one RAID0 drive, two separate RAID1 drives, one RAID 10 drive, or four separate drives. I've included a picture below, and more information can be found at http://www.addonics.com/products/fla...r/ad4cfprj.asp.



Addonics also makes Compact Flash to SATA converters, and the hardware that will let you mount them in 3.5" and 2.5" bays. They also make this:



Use your imagination, it will fit into a single 5.25" drive bay.

The folks over in the mp3car forum have spent a lot of time using Compact Flash as hard drive replacements and have addressed some of the main problems with them. Before someone brings up the write-cycle lifetime of using Compact Flash cards make sure you take a look at a driver released from Microsoft called the Enhanced Write Driver (EWF).

EWF can provide an overlay of a file system in RAM. Any writes to the file system get saved to RAM, essentially tricking the operating system into thinking the write was successful. When the computer reboots the information in RAM gets lost. It can also do the same to a hard drive, but then you lose most of the advantageous of using flash memory.

Sometimes, it is easier to just spend the extra $300 and get a proper solid state drive. There is something to be said about buying a product by a single SKU instead of a two page bill of materials and assembly instructions that read like the recently released Budget of the United States Government.

As a side note, Keyclone's comment on multiple disk is correct. When you start issuing a large number of read and write requests you will eventually reach a point where one disk can not perform the work. You need more hands (disk). I work on some smaller computer systems, one of which we need to run across about 100 15K Fibre disk in order to meet our Service Level Agreement (SLA). The only other way we could reach that is with a RAMSAN (think giant compact flash card). And, no, they won't let me run Warcraft on it.