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There are a few USB drives designed for embedded use which plug directly into the USB header on the motherboard but your solution is more cost effective for non-critical applications. I have a couple of IDE to CF adapters which I use for the same application.

http://www.transcendusa.com/Products/ModDetail.asp?ModNo=122&LangNo=0&Func1No=1&Func2No=159
http://www.psism.com/eusb.htm
http://www.ptiglobalusa.com/emusbfldrmo.html
http://www.atpinc.com/p2-4a.php?sn=00000417

I run an 8 GB Transcend 133x in my Alix board as a router/firewall on FreeBSD, and the BIOS and OS pick it up as UDMA33 without a problem. I get sustained reads of 33 MB/s and writes of about 9.5 MB/s.

There are specific SSD's that are not slower than mag platter drives, but the cheap SSD's are slow in their transfer times.

Take an older slower seagate 160gb (taken from hdtune)ST3160827AS at 56.8 MB/sec and a 12.8 ms seek. Even the advertised maximum of a transcend SATA ssd is a read up to 30 MB / sec and a write up to 28 MB / s. The solid state drive is approximately half the speed of the mag platter drive and realistically, less.

It is true that the latency and seek times are incredibly fast on solid state, but it really depends on what your using the drive for whether solid state will work faster for you or not.

I think both the Samsung and Super Talent SDDs are over-priced. For those that are in the market today for a solid-state-drive (mainly laptop owners), they will likely care the most about 2 things - power consumption, and weight, and any SDD will outperform a magnetic disk in those categories. I would recommend 32 GB 2.5" SATA SDD from Transcend at 1/3 of the cost of the 64 GB Samsung model. Aside from that, and especially if gigabytes are not the highest priority, there are also excellent, and much cheaper solutions for those who are willing to take the time to play around, such as this CF / IDE adapter from Addonics. Last, but not least, if it isn't already obvious, solid state disks only have a limited lifespan, and it's usually much shorter than the lifespan quoted by the manufacturer, unless they came up with a new, super-advanced wear-leveling algorithm. Never estimate the value of making periodic backups to a more reliable permanent storage facility!

At work we have win2K running on a shuttle pc using an addonics cf-ide adaptor
http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_read er/adidecf.asp
with a transcend 4GB cf card that had the win2k image ghosted from the disk drive
http://ec.transcendusa.com/product/ItemDetail.asp? ItemID=TS4GCF120

It can be done.

• I can make my own 16gb solid-state IDE disk for only $150 (and 32gb CF cards are coming out in a few months).
  
• Does the $300 Transcend solid-state disk include any additional caching features or other speed-up? (the web site doesn't say: http://www.transcendusa.com/Products/ModDetail.asp ?ModNo=164&SpNo=3&LangNo=0)
  
• Are the 32gb disks anything more than just a little RAID0 chip with two 16gb CF cards attached?
  

Pros:

• More reliable: No moving parts; no head crash; no wobble
• Low latency, high throughput (all seem to offer low latency, some don't do so good on throughput)
• Low power requirements
• Low heat production
• No noise

Cons:

• High price
• Small capacity

Samsung SSD
http://www.samsung.com/eu/Products/Semiconductor/p roducts/ssd.asp

Lexar SSD
http://www.lexar.com/ssd/expresscard.html

Sandisk SSD
http://www.sandisk.com/OEM/ProductCatalog(1274)-Sa nDisk_SSD_Solid_State_Drives.aspx

Transcend SSD
http://www.transcendusa.com/Products/ModDetail.asp ?ModNo=162

You can buy a 32GB Samsung from NewEgg for $534 incl shipping.

Transcend has a couple of products in this space that I find relatively compelling: The Digital Album, and the PhotoBank.

I'm about to spend a few weeks in Britain, carrying a digital SLR and a few lenses. I'd love to take my iBook, but it's hard to justify the weight and space for a sightseeing trip where I'll be walking and taking the train a lot - given the weight and space I'm devoting to camera, I just couldn't see taking the laptop. I looked into a lot of devices - I really wanted to go the iPod route since I'll have that with me anyway, but those solutions are way slow and battery hungry. Some other products either seemed unappealing or were expensive compared to what I ended up purchasing - Transcend's Digital Album.

http://www.transcendusa.com/products/ModDetail.asp ?ModNo=29
http://www.steves-digicams.com/2004_reviews/digita l_album.html

I paid $350 for the Digital Album (from target.com - via Amazon, actually). It is a small, battery-powered device (claims 4-5 hours battery life on the preinstalled but apparently-replaceable rechargeable battery) with a 20 GB drive and a color screen for reviewing the photos. Can feed a TV (NTSC or PAL) and play slideshows. Handles U.S., European and British power with a funky power plug that converts for the target outlet. USB2 for talking to the computer (shows up as an external drive on Mac OS X; I believe it does the same on Windows). Has ports that supposedly handle a whole slew of card types. I've used it with CompactFlash - if I remember correctly, it took about 2 minutes or so to copy 200 MB from a fairly fast card (SanDisk Ultra II 512 MB card).

It seems to work pretty well, with a few UI disappointments (for instance, choosing to delete something prompted me with an alert that made me a bit nervous it was going to delete the entire drive). It can also record 10-second audio annotations for images. Can play MP3s, but frankly the interface made it look like that would be painful. I really wish it had more than 20 GB - it's not so hard to fill that over any extended period if you're taking lots of photos at a high pixel count, especially if you shoot RAW. I shoot some RAW but mostly JPEG, so I expect this to suffice for my immediate trips. Since I can view the photos on it, I'll be able to go through and prune some if I need the space.

Transcend also has their PhotoBank device, with similar basic feature set except that it doesn't have the color screen for reviewing photos, doesn't feed a TV, and doesn't do stuff like play MP3s. But it's cheaper at $250, and there is a 40 GB version for $340.

http://www.transcendusa.com/Products/ModDetail.asp ?ModNo=11
http://www.steves-digicams.com/2004_reviews/photob ank.html

I considered buying the PhotoBank, but decided I really liked the idea of being able to visually confirm that it had successfully copied the photos from my camera card, and I may want to show photos taken during the trip to people I visit while still on the trip, hence my decision to go with the Digital Album.

-andrew

Transcend has a couple of products in this space that I find relatively compelling: The Digital Album, and the PhotoBank.

I'm about to spend a few weeks in Britain, carrying a digital SLR and a few lenses. I'd love to take my iBook, but it's hard to justify the weight and space for a sightseeing trip where I'll be walking and taking the train a lot - given the weight and space I'm devoting to camera, I just couldn't see taking the laptop. I looked into a lot of devices - I really wanted to go the iPod route since I'll have that with me anyway, but those solutions are way slow and battery hungry. Some other products either seemed unappealing or were expensive compared to what I ended up purchasing - Transcend's Digital Album.

http://www.transcendusa.com/products/ModDetail.asp ?ModNo=29
http://www.steves-digicams.com/2004_reviews/digita l_album.html

I paid $350 for the Digital Album (from target.com - via Amazon, actually). It is a small, battery-powered device (claims 4-5 hours battery life on the preinstalled but apparently-replaceable rechargeable battery) with a 20 GB drive and a color screen for reviewing the photos. Can feed a TV (NTSC or PAL) and play slideshows. Handles U.S., European and British power with a funky power plug that converts for the target outlet. USB2 for talking to the computer (shows up as an external drive on Mac OS X; I believe it does the same on Windows). Has ports that supposedly handle a whole slew of card types. I've used it with CompactFlash - if I remember correctly, it took about 2 minutes or so to copy 200 MB from a fairly fast card (SanDisk Ultra II 512 MB card).

It seems to work pretty well, with a few UI disappointments (for instance, choosing to delete something prompted me with an alert that made me a bit nervous it was going to delete the entire drive). It can also record 10-second audio annotations for images. Can play MP3s, but frankly the interface made it look like that would be painful. I really wish it had more than 20 GB - it's not so hard to fill that over any extended period if you're taking lots of photos at a high pixel count, especially if you shoot RAW. I shoot some RAW but mostly JPEG, so I expect this to suffice for my immediate trips. Since I can view the photos on it, I'll be able to go through and prune some if I need the space.

Transcend also has their PhotoBank device, with similar basic feature set except that it doesn't have the color screen for reviewing photos, doesn't feed a TV, and doesn't do stuff like play MP3s. But it's cheaper at $250, and there is a 40 GB version for $340.

http://www.transcendusa.com/Products/ModDetail.asp ?ModNo=11
http://www.steves-digicams.com/2004_reviews/photob ank.html

I considered buying the PhotoBank, but decided I really liked the idea of being able to visually confirm that it had successfully copied the photos from my camera card, and I may want to show photos taken during the trip to people I visit while still on the trip, hence my decision to go with the Digital Album.

-andrew

If by "smaller and lighter" you mean "50% wider, 70% heavier and twice as thick." Try again dude.

Companies involved in various aspects of this market include Archos, Nikon, Sony, SanDisk and Epson, as well as a whole slew of smaller names like I/OMagic, Sima, Transcend, Vosonic, Innoplus, Digi Magic and Delkin.

Right now, today, the new iPod Photo isn't destroying their market share. But as of today, we're at the point where we can buy an iPod and a little gizmo (like the SanDisk one) we stick flash cards into for display on a TV... or just buy an iPod Photo. With that Belkin attachment, any iPod can be your place to dump photos in the field. And other than adding card slots, most of the other features other products have that the iPod Photo doesn't offer can be added in firmware updates. One at a time. Step by step. Until another market segment is overrun by white-earbudded iPod people. :)

But by the time that happens, the iPod Photo will probably have video playback capability, since again, that's totally just a matter of adding the capabilities through a firmware upgrade. Sure, it's not a top priority for Apple right now, but they've got the hardware now, and just have to code the functionality in the firmware.

In a year or two, will we all be saying "iPod uber alles" with regard to things other than music? Dunno. But if it happens, I won't be surprised.

http://www.transcendusa.com/Transcend/PressDetail. asp?pruid=124

https://ec.transcendusa.com/product/memspitem.asp

and

http://news.amdplanet.it/news.php?a=shownews&last= 1883