I just came across a website that offers a number of different solutions for replacing IDE and SATA II hard drives with CF cards. Some of their solutions allow RAID 0 matricing of up to 4 CF cards. They've tested 266x CF cards at 39 MB/sec, for single CF card configurations on SATA II. Prices are quite reasonable. Using a SATA port multiplier and 16 GB CF cards, one could conceivably build an 16x5=80 Gb solid state, external hard drive. Mounting a CF card in this manner allows formatting it to NTFS.

For my own uses, I like putting an 8Gb CF card in a 2.5 inch SATA HD enclosure and RAIDing two together for 16Gb. WinXP will detect SATA devices as fixed partitions. Without testing the thruput, I would expect a speed of about 60-70 MBps.
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