Three CF cards, one SATA adapter
To nerdilettantes, Century's triple CF card SATA adapter is Manna from Heaven, which is to say, from Asia. Jam three compact flash cards in, and there you go—an instant solid state disk drive. The problem is that it's $200, which is pure comedy, especially given the 20 MB/s throughput it'll provide.
On the other hand, real SSDs have even greater markups over CF, so if you're after size instead of speed, why not? Just don't think of those increasingly-cheap terabyte hard drives; remember, this is a holy war.
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Cheaper, for IDE interface:
http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/accessories/cf_adapters
Logic Supply is an embedded systems supplier, nice people to do business with. Turn your old laptop into a flash box.
Oh yeah, put more RAM in it, install linux.
I'm a big fan of Logic Supply; I have Pico ITX motherboards in and have been meaning to get necessary stuff for it there.
make sure if you install windows on one of these things you have plenty of ram, and kill your page file. Paging a CF card will destroy it. Pretty much all CF cards have a certain number of time they can initiate a R/W cycle, and once that number is reached, so is their end. As the first poster said go with linux if you can, or just turn off the paging.
Actually, the large size of modern flash devices, plus wear levelling that spreads activity out over the entire device, means that even if a 4Gb device will only survive for 100,000 write cycles, you can probably write to it for half a year non-stop without any errors:
http://www.dansdata.com/flashswap.htm
Since these devices usually last for more write cycles, and even swap-disk use doesn't mean non-stop writes, it's reasonable to expect at least a few years of service from a modern CompactFlash card being used as a system disk.
There are considerable other problems with cheap adapters like the ones linked to above, though. A simple pin adapter connects a CF card directly to the ATA bus, which means the card needs to support UDMA transfer modes AND report itself as a "fixed disk" for it to be usable as a general purpose Windows boot device. Most cards fall at one or both hurdles. More expensive adapters presumably get around this problem.