I have a Fujitsu U810 and I'm thinking about replacing the mechanical HD with an SSD so I don't have to be quite as careful about vibration/shock/etc. I need to double check the connector, but do they even have SSDs in that size, that are at least 40gb, and match the performance of the mechanical drive (I remember early SSDs that were not up to par in terms of performance)?
the drive is a Toshiba MK4009GAL 1.8" ZIF model. It looks like there are a few options out there for 1.8" drives. There seem to be some fairly inexpensive (considering its a pretty niche market) drives. But are the not worth looking at? What I see are Kingspec, RunCore, Super Talent, and MTron. It looks like Super Talent has a couple different models as well that cover a few different price points. I'm not familar with any of these brands as SSD manufacturers (and very little in other areas.) Benchmarks seem hard to come by so I can't validate the speed claims either. Another possibility is a CF adpator if any CF cards have speeds comparable to a hard drive. I have not had good experiences with them in the past, but it may be that I just don't know how to choose them. Or maybe it is that CF cards don't have a RAM cache like an HD. So what is the wisdom of the Bit forums?
I wouldn't recommend a CF card, they don't last too long when they are subjected to the huge number of reads/writes that a primary drive usually is. Can't help you otherwise, I've seen the Super Talent ZIF drives for sale, and I assume that they are made for laptop HDD upgrades, but I haven't seen a review of them. The price is right though, call Super Talent up and ask if the drive will work? And the performance question, if 2.5" drive speed carries over to 1.8" drives, then you should see a huge bump up.
