Need cheap as balls, small ssd's for strange applications.

Basically, I need a set of SSD's from things as normal as boot drives to things as odd as zfs caching and the zil in NFS.

However; for all purposes I need very small SSD's. 6GB would even be fine; possibly down to 4? I would have to see how much space it takes to stick a minimal buntu or windows install on. (but not one of those crazy minimal like, 1.5 MB installs I've seen )

I've seen some PCI ssd's, not sure how those are, never had a chance to use one, any thoughts? Other than that, my only prerequisits are speedy r/w and cheap as balls. I've looked at the ones the egg offers, and I'm not sure if one can get fast+cheap but mayhaps there are other options for tiny drives that egg doesn't show that would suit my needs?

What about one of those compact flash to IDE/SATA adapters? That would be cheap, but wouldn't offer the same performance of an SSD however.

Let me talk to a engineer down the hall from me tomorrow.

how about a 256mb (YES MB) Pata SSD...

goddamn that's tiny. How much do those go for? I don't think I've ever seen something that small outside of scsiland. Also, what's the read/write on that thing?

One of these or these would let you use a CF card as a SATA HD. Throw in a 4GB CF card for $10 bucks, and off you go. The specs show that one in particular has a data transfer rate: 15~40MB/sec(Max).

windows xp can be stripped down pretty easily and retain almost all functionality.... i think i got a full install of xp on 850 mb once... sp3 n everything... only things i were missing was IIS, windows media player, games... things that no one ever needs.

Ninth said:

goddamn that's tiny. How much do those go for? I don't think I've ever seen something that small outside of scsiland. Also, what's the read/write on that thing?

Click to expand...

I have an old tablet pc (made by something odd like Xerox or Samsung or something) that uses one for its primary drive. It runs wundows 95 tablet edition. 50mhz processor, stylus and iirc 16mb of RAM. Uses two Sony brand camcorder batteries for power

If you just need a few GB, why not go with RAM?

You can make a RAM disk on boot, decompress a disk image onto it, and use it as root partition. I've done it with Ubuntu before, it works. Performance improvement is not really as much as I hoped, though.

I technically could, but 4-6 gigs of ram is way out of my price range, whereas a 4-6 gig ssd might just be cheap enough, possibly maybe.

Also, @ the tablet thing, IMO computers were far more interesting when we actually had to WORK just to get enough power to piece one together, it showed a lot more ingenuity in the solutions that finally came to be.

If 4GB ram is out of your range, I do not think you will find a SSD that meets your qualifications.

There are 4-6gb SSDs. They are called SD cards.

They are just like SSDs, except they only have 1 flash chip, as opposed to 10-20 on an SSD that are accessed in parallel to give them the speed.

You'll be hard pressed to find tiny SSDs that use a bunch of even tinier flash chips in parallel, because that's just not cost effective.

The smallest SSDs you can find now are probably 32GB, but they are probably going to phase that out soon, because 64GB isn't much more expensive.

The main cost of flash chips is low yield. At high densities, most chips will fail quality control. That's why the good chips have to be priced higher to compensate for that.

But if the technology can already make 16GB chips, 1GB chips will probably have an 100% yield. But it doesn't cost any more to make it 2GB instead, because it will also have ~100% yield. That's why there's a minimum SSD size - because it's not much/any cheaper to make smaller ones. At this point it's 32GB.

The HP Mini Netbooks have cheap SSDs in them... i think i have an 8GB PATA drive here. Win 7 and several apps will fit on it no problem.