I just started using the CF card as a hard-drive replacement.
And I like it. It is quiet and fast. Great for Windows 95,98,ME and 2000.
Great for operating systems that support multi-tasking.
The are easy to find and inexpensive for an 8gb or 16gb card.

I have one in my AMD 5x86@133mhz. and 64mb ram.
In Win95 I can run Nortons Anti Virus scan, Listen to a music CD and surf the internet at the same time.
You can't do that with a regular hard-drive.

Just try to find a good CF card adapter because some are cheap and break easy.

I don't know if KAN is still interested in this topic, but also be aware that there are typically at least two different grades of devices where SD and CF are concerned. Most of the devices you see at retailers tend to be consumer/commercial class devices, but there are industrial grade devices produced by some manufacturers as well. This blurb by Delkin enumerates some of the differences between the two classes of CF devices:

https://www.delkin.com/blog/top-differences-i … rcial-cf-cards/

You will pay more for the industrial class devices, and the number of vendors is likely to be smaller as well, but it may be worth it depending on your application.

Windows9566 wrote:

CF cards die too, but different than hard drives, when all the read/write cycles are used up. i guess there's no reliable storage options for retro PCs

Nice thread necro.

As far as CF cards go, you definitely need a quality brand. The first ones I bought were made by Monster and while they worked fine on newer computers, even though they were all the same part number, none of them had the same configuration parameters as any of the others and they would not work properly on older systems.

In any case, you can always use an IDE to SATA or mSATA adapter so you can use newer drives and even SSDs

This definitely works for systems that have LBA support. Older systems, you would need to use a card with a card with an updated IDE BIOS such as XT-IDE.

You can also use certain PCI SATA controllers on older systems with PCI slots which will give you everything you need in one card.