I have an old Sony laptop (Vaio TR1-MP) that I like. The HDD has died and since it's a hard-to-find 1.8" IDE hard drive I'm considering buying one of those little CF card adaptors and a 16gb CF card. The total cost of that is about £30 and replacement HDDs for this model are far pricier.

Has anyone replaced their HDD with a CF card in this way, and, crucially, is the performance utterly horrible afterwards? ;-) I've seen a couple of threads which hint it's possible but the advice eventually given was just to buy a SSD, but I'm not even sure if its possible to get a 1.8" SSD with an IDE connector that'll fit my laptop.

(I freely admit that the most sensible thing to do would be to bin it and just buy a cheap netbook which would be smaller, faster and lighter than the sony, but it does have a very nice widescreen display and dammit I just like it !)

Thanks,

G