Adopting new technology is always a difficult process – it’s fortunate that a slew of products to compensate for this always show up to ease this transition. The problem is, most look horrible and doesn’t work that well. In the case of Solid State Drives (SSD) as a replacement for the regular, mechanical spinning drives, the rate of adoption is especially low – mainly due to SSD’s high price and a compromise in size versus its admittedly higher performance.

Sans Digital’s CompactSTOR CR2T is a Compact Flash to SATA converter / enclosure that mimics the look of a typical 2.5” SATA drive, which means that once you slot in your chosen CF cards, the drive can be used exactly like how you’d use a 2.5” SATA drive. It is perfect for laptop hard drive replacement, but only if your upgrade is aimed at increasing performance and not total size, since most modern laptop drives already start at 80GB, and the biggest easily available CF card tops out at 32GB (x2 is 64GB). The enclosure’s maximum supported size is 64GB.

                                             Two CF slots.

The product is not a simple enclosure either, it also offers RAID capabilities in its small form factor, either Mirroring (RAID 1) for the purpose of instant backups by copying the same data to both CF cards, or Striping (RAID 0) for increased performance. Striping works by dividing a piece of data between the two CF cards, thus resulting in a large, single drive (64GB in this case). It must be said however that a Striped array means any error in either CF card will render your data inaccessible, as all data is equally divided between the cards.

                                             Power and SATA connectors are exactly the same as regular SATA drives.

So if you’re taking the wait-and-see route for the new-ish SSD technology, a fine way to try out its advantages is the CR2T which gives you nearly the same performance as an actual SSD drive (depending on the type of CF card slotted in), costs thousands less, has the same robust operation as SSD, yet trumps a regular mechanical drive on all key performance traits, except perhaps write times and size. For the unwilling upgrader who’s still interested in the newest features and offerings available with SSD, this is a fine way to test things out before making the jump.