DIY SSD drive has memory flaw

Gah, here’s today’s leading competitor in “so much promise, but nope” race: Century’s SDB25SD DIY Solid State Drive (SSD).  A little background for those out of the hard drive loop: SSD is flash-based storage rather than traditional moving hard-drives, which means a) they’re faster, and b) they’re not prone to shaking-related errors, what with having a grand total of zero moving parts.  They’re starting to appear in certain laptops and UMPCs, but the high price of large-capacity flash memory compared to similar capacity traditional hard-drives means the products themselves end up forced into a niche market.

Century’s offering suggests you could replace a standard 2.5-inch hard drive with this SD caddy, giving any laptop or portable willing to open up its guts for replacement a less-power-hungry, more responsive lease of life.  Sadly, it’s not all wine and roses.

For a start, the Century drive is only capable of taking up to four 2GB SD cards, giving a maximum of 8GB storage.  Pretty paltry, and not even enough for Vista (although Linux or Windows XP will happily install).  That’s because it’s not SDHC compatible: “Secure Digital High Capacity” uses the same form-factor as SD but, thanks to a different memory-addressing method, requires devices to be specifically compatible.

It’s a shame, because with SDHC you could slot in four 32GB cards and have an awesome 128GB super-speedy array.  Fingers-crossed that something along those lines is on Century’s to-do list.  The SDB25SD is priced at around $258.50

GeekStuff4U [via Akihabara News]