Can’t afford a new notebook? Pimp your old one with flash
A couple of folks sent me this link to the $30 Addonics CF drive adapter.

Plug in a couple of 8 GB CF cards, or better yet, 16 GB cards and you have an upgradeable flash drive whose components you can re-use. What’s not to like?

Here’s a picture from the Addonics website:

Cute, eh? And I love their recommendation to tape it into your notebook drive bay. Harks back to the early days of personal computing.

The StorageMojo take
I haven’t tried the product – hey Addonics, how about a review unit, SATA version please – but I really like the concept. The flash cards all seem to have solid interfaces and high volume production, so why not use them for disk storage?

I even saw a wireless print server designed to fit in a CF slot. CF seems to have a lot of life in it.

My MacBook uses a SATA drive, and the current Addonics CF to SATA adapter only holds a single CF card, so it isn’t yet practical for me. But if flash prices drop another 70% this year then by early 2008 a 16 GB CF card will cost less than $100 online. That will be mighty attractive.

Or will it?

Learn more about flash drives next week
I’m working on an article about flash drive performance for Monday. I think you’ll like it.

Comments welcome, especially if you’ve tried one of these beasts. Moderation is a virtue, except in the defense of liberty.