I'm building a PC designed to go into a car. I'm facing tight space issues, so I am considering a solid state hard drive. My only concern was the speed of going solid state. I have installed windows xp on an old 1.6GB hard drive I found (ATA-33) and on a 2GB 60X compact flash card using a IDE to CF adapter. I ran speed tests on both. Then for the hell of it, I also ran speed tests on my faster Dell machine and a 2GB usb2 key. Below are the results. I'd like to get your thoughts on which drive would be best to use. Of course the Dell Machine and the ATA-33 are out. I've seen a lot of writeups on building PC's that run the OS from a CF card, but after doing the test, why aren't more people using usb2 flash keys instead? If there are better tools (freeware) to run speed tests let me know and I'll run tests again.

Sorry, here's the link to the chart... http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v628/butlerm77/flashcompare.gif

Just a comment. Flash memory has a finite life in the number of erase write cycles. Whether it is 100,000 or 1,000,000,000. If not optimized for use in an application like windows swap files, temp files and directories, then there is a real chance of exceeding the cycle tatings in a relatively short time.