During a stroll in Hall One we came across a Japanese company called Century that makes various storage accessories. What peaked our interest were three different devices, all performing pretty much the same task.
What we had spotted was a 3.5-inch Compact Flash DIY SSD adapter which accepts up to four Compact Flash cards, as well as an SD version that takes up to eight SD cards, and maybe most interestingly of all, a USB version that accepts four USB drives.
All three flash adapters, for lack of a better word, connect via SATA, although the Compact Flash version can also use IDE. As you can see from the picture below, all three are the size of a hard drive.
We didn't manage to find out too many details about these flash adapters and we tried to ask if they used two kind of an algorithm to prevent the one sector of the flash devices from being written to more than others, but they weren't sure if this was the case or not.
This could well work out as a cheap option to an SSD drive, but don't expect either model to be as fast or reliable as a true SSD drive. Still, with a bit of luck we might be getting a review sample when the products are ready to ship; and if so, we'll bring you more details on how well they work.
