Hello everyone,
So I've been trying to use for a while now a few CompactFlash cards from different manufacturers on different systems, using on-board VIA, and ALi controllers, and add-on PCI controllers such as the Promise Ultra100 TX2 and the Sil0680 and honestly reliability, or should I say, system stability is not great.

FYI, I tried on a Shuttle HOT-433v4 Am5x86-133 PCI board and two SS7 boards with an AMD-K6-III+ 450: ASUS P5A v1.05 (ALi Alladin V) and DFI K6XV3+/66 (VIA MVP3).

The Promise controller gives me the BEST performance by far, but locks up the system too often, and the faster the cf card, the less reliable the system becomes.
The on-board controllers often detect the cards but can't seem to boot off of them or freeze temporarily in DOS.

The only reliable controller I have used with CompactFlash has been the Sil0680.
Its NOT fast, and on all systems seems to max out at 5MB/s in DOS and ~20ish in Windows 98 but it works with all my cards, and never crashes or freezes my system.

My most sensitive cards were the Lexar Professional cards (16GB 1066x and 32GB 800x).
Unfortunately, my Sandisk cards are all 2GB or less.

What experiences have you had?
What was the most stable controller/card combo?