How to Build a Quiet Laptop Hard Drive
By Janean Wilson

When I bought a used laptop off an online auction site,
it did not come with a hard drive.

In my search for a laptop hard drive, I discovered a way to make a hard drive from compact flash memory card.

I bought a bootable CF to 2.5" IDE Adapter. This adapter allows you to use a compact flash memory card as your primary hard drive. It works as a standard IDE hard drive on a laptop.

The adapter connects to the 44-pin connector in most laptops. I have found that some laptop connectors have a pin hole in the middle blocked, making the adapter not fit. I imagine you could snip off the pin on the adapter and it should fit, but I have not tried it myself.

You can boot on any operating system from a compact flash memory card using this type of adapter. I recommend using Windows 98 as your operating system. Windows XP makes too many read/write cycles that can shorten the life span of the compact flash memory card. Windows XP requires at least 3 GB to install. Windows 98 only requires a minimum of 256 MB to install.

The best advantage to using a compact flash memory card as a hard drive is that if your laptop gets dropped, the memory card is more likely to survive the fall than a regular hard drive.

The new mini laptops use a similar hard drive setup which is called a Solid State Drive (SSD).

I use this adapter and a 2 GB memory for my laptop. It works well with Windows 98 and I have added a Wi-Fi card for Internet access.