Compact Flash to IDE adapter

michael baxter

michael baxter

michael baxter

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8 Nov 2005
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668
I'm interested in replacing the HD in my HTPC with a Compact Flash to IDE adapter and a large CompactFlash module.

Has anyone had a go at this, and if so how did work out and what problems did you have?
 
I got a few of these adaprters.

They are spot on

I got mine purely for use in my Atari Falcon. For a PC they are a tad slow to be honest, thats not to say that they are slow to use, because they are not... The Falcon accesses its Hard Disks a lot slower than a PC, so for the Falcon, it was better than the real thing, plus of course the extra handyness of the size.

I have both Dual and Single adapters. The dual adapter does not seem to workon the Atari, not that it matters as I use it only for my C: with my SCSI SCSI Drives for the rest of the HDs.

On the PC, I used a 1GB and a 4GB Card in one adapter, and run NT4 for a few weeks to try it out and it ran fairly sweet... The PC I had it in was a K6/2 500 and to be honest, a laptop would be fine, but for a desktop, it will feel a tad slow.

Erm, what else?

Well, I have also tried a pair of 4GB Cards in a pair of adapters on an SIL0680 PCI card and set them up as RAID... Bit silly I know, but also a bit of fun too!

I cannot remember the results, nor can I find them, but I know I have them saved... I gained about a 60% speed increase IIRC, but at the time, setting them up as an 8GB Raid array purely for a C: was a little expensive and it was still slower than a real HD, so I never kept it.

Anyway, either way, they work and they work very well to be fair.

Oh, one other thing...

The adapters I have are all offering different advantages...

A couple of the dual adapters for example, allow me to add a pair of 4GB Cards and I get one 8GB Drive... Sort of making its own RAID in a way... Other dual cards will give me the 2x4GB Drives.

They can all be set as Master or Slave by way of a jumper.
 
Well, I suppose yes.

I have a couple of motherboards that support booting from USB Flash, so if I wanted to, I could do it, but although I have done it, its slow as hell. Its handy for chucking a small OS onto for recovery of your Windows setup perhaps, but to be honest, it took about 5 minutes to boot up, and everythign was just too slow. So slow in fact, that it would be a lot quicker to just give up and reinstall.

The way to find ouyt really, would be to have a look in the BIOS... Soem BIOSes might now show this obviously, so maybe disconnect the HD, and boot from a DOS Floppy and see if FDISK helps out?

I did that on a fairly old PC and it found a 64MB Drive, which was my USB Disk at the time, so I created a FAT partition, rebooted and formatted it as a system and sure enough it booted from the flash disk... Chucked Win3.11 onto it and had a great laugh for days... But, as I said, its too slow to bother with even Win95 on it never mind 2K or XP!!!

Compact Flash are also IDE compatible, which is why its easy to make up an adapter for them you see...I think even pin for pin, but I cant be bothered counting the pins on a CF Card right now.
 
FatRakoon,

Thanks for the info'!

I may well go for a 2.5 inch laptop drive until the CF speed increases, which no doubt it will! But, I must admit I quite fancy trying it out, just for fun.

By the way, do you remember the speed of the CF your were using?

Impressed with your RAID experiment!

Thanks again,

Michael
 
silversurfer said:
Didnt think of this before, I have a 233mmx rig which might benefit from this kind of thing. I might get this out of interest and I dont have a memory card otherwise at present

How about this:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Female-IDE-to...3QQihZ011QQcategoryZ41994QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
Click to expand...


That one will go straight onto the Motherboard... Mine go onto a normal IDE Cable... Admittedly, the Atari has 2.5" internal jobbie, and I have used a 2.5-3.5 adapter previously, but now I use a simple 2.5-3.5 Cable.

I will be honest here, but on the Atari, there are some CF Cards that dont really work too hot in one of these, however, the Atari is really to blame over the card or adapter because a lot of real HDs dont work in an Atari either.


michael baxter said:
FatRakoon,

Thanks for the info'!

I may well go for a 2.5 inch laptop drive until the CF speed increases, which no doubt it will! But, I must admit I quite fancy trying it out, just for fun.

By the way, do you remember the speed of the CF your were using?

Impressed with your RAID experiment!

Thanks again,

Michael
Click to expand...


What speed? - erm, a 12x and a 40x I think I used... The 12x is in there now as thats the bigger one.

There is very little real difference in speed between 1x and 40x to be honest, so unless they bring out a 1million x CF card, dont hold your breath.
 
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