I suppose my first question is what is the fastest flash card available? Both in terms of access time (which should be 1ms or better) and in terms of sustained transfer rate (which would hopefully rival an hdd). Capacity of 1GB or better would be nessesary for it to be usefull for my purposes but the bigger the better of course. I'm interested in compact flash, SD, MMC, and all the other revisions of those little square plastic chips, and also ATA Flash, or any rendition there of. Sense there are so many different options out there and I've spent about 2 hours tonight just browsing around the different stuff available and I still dont feel like I have a good handle on what the best solution for my purposes is I figured I would post a question. Also the flash card needs to be able to use an adapter to ide. I have found those adapters for the ATA Flash and the Compact Flash and I'm not really sure if the Compact Flash adapters are compatible with SD and MMC sense they dont really specify. But whether its nessesary or not I suppose depends on your answer to the first question of which is fastest. So far I'm under the impression that MMC is the fastest out there, coming in at 30MB/s. But I am unsure of the access time and that is one of my bigger concerns. I intend to get two ide adapters and plug whatever cards I decide on into them. From there I want to put the ide adapters on my laptop's ide interface and turn them into a striped raid which I will install windows to. My intent is to have a solid state storage solution that will fit windows and maybe some other stuff. (Having two 8GB flash cards would be cool but spensive so we'll see) With an access time of under a ms which I know the ATA Flash cards have would make windows scream on boot and on any other minor drive access. Because windows drive accesses are mostly small I dont think a low sustained x-fer rate of 9MB/s would really be an issue especially if it were doubles threw a stripped raid. Well thats pretty much it. I'd appreciate any input on the matter. Obviously I'm just dreaming up things to do and I've always wanted a cool solid state solution to install the operating system to. I'm hoping such a thing has finally reached joe blow consumer's spectrum.
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