Solid state disk are not faster than PC hard drives, they are slower (but decent) reading and much slower writing.

You gain ruggedness - they can sustain a higher level of shock and vibration and are not susceptable to mechanical failure (like hard drives are). They are still sensitive to static shock though.

I have a couple of embedded projects at, we use LB SBCs (little board, single-board-computers) which have a compact flash slot built onto the motherboard. It shows up like a normal IDE drive to the OS.

There is also DOM, disk-on-module, which if IIRC is a way to plug a solid-state disk into a standard IDE connector. This will also appear as a normal IDE device to the OS.

For deeply embedded applications, you can use the romfs to turn an (E(E))PROM or flash memory into a mount point.