A SD to IDE adapter and a SD card is good enough and cheaper than a CF card.

Both are way faster than you need on a Pentium1 / 486

Pino wrote on 2024-07-09, 13:19:

A SD to IDE adapter and a SD card is good enough and cheaper than a CF card.

Are there any compatibility issues to watch out for? SD cards come in a variety of speeds and specs.

For my 486 I just went with a CF card. Mostly because it's easier and more straight forward to just get an CF card with a smaller capacity inside the limits of what a 486 can handle than an SD card. Smallest SD card I can find anymore is still several GB. Although I do have some downright ancient ones in the 512 MB range, but they are so slow it might actually be noticeable on a 486 even.

I use CompactFlash cards on my 486 and Pentium systems.

The cards I've found work well include official SanDisk and Verbatim branded cards.

I use standard speeds (e.g. not the ultra versions) and buy them new whenever possible. Verbatim cards were being sold brand new via Amazon.

Tempest wrote on 2024-07-09, 14:07:

Pino wrote on 2024-07-09, 13:19:

A SD to IDE adapter and a SD card is good enough and cheaper than a CF card.

Are there any compatibility issues to watch out for? SD cards come in a variety of speeds and specs.

I would consider something like these
Here's an idea: using high endurance (micro)SD cards meant for continuous video recording as storage for retro gear .

So the two best options are still CF and SD? Other than size/price/availability issues, is there any real difference between the two?

For CF adapters, I was told that this StarTech one was the most compatible: https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Single-Ad … /dp/B000T9QQP0/

What's the best one for SD cards? I don't know what chipset my two PCs have (IBM ValuePoint 433SX/S and IBM Personal Computer 350).

What about for something in the P4 range? I have a Dell XPS P4 that also has a noisy old hard drive in it. Would some kind of IDE to SATA adapter be better for that model?

Tempest wrote on 2024-07-09, 15:38:

So the two best options are still CF and SD? Other than size/price/availability issues, is there any real difference between the two?

One of the main differences is that CompactFlash is (generally) natively IDE compatible. CF-to-IDE adapters are generally just pin-to-pin adapters, possibly with voltage regulation built-in.

Whereas SD adapters use a different interface and therefore require more complex translation to IDE.

Personally I haven't used SD adapters so I can't speak to if this makes a difference in reliability, but I have found CompactFlash to be generally reliable.

What about for something in the P4 range? I have a Dell XPS P4 that also has a noisy old hard drive in it. Would some kind of IDE to SATA adapter be better for that model?

For a P4 I would use an SSD drive with an IDE-to-SATA adapter.

Ok I'm thinking CF is probably the way to go for maximum compatibility. That StarTech adapter looks nice, isn't too expensive, and I've had multiple people tell me that it worked really well so I'll probably go with that. What brand/speed/class of CF would people recommend?

I got a StarTech adapter and the cheapest compastflash card I could find. Some noname brand Amazon says is manufactured by "Bdiskky". I'm sure if I was using it for any sort of industrial grade application, or a computer that was unusually laborious to set up, I might end up upset. Hell, I might still find myself upset if I'm in the middle of a particularly good game and I lose my save. But if anything goes wrong, I'll only be installing DOS again on an actual brand name CF card, which is worlds easier than Win95 on up.

I actually have a 2GB DOM module here I could try, but it looks like it has a little power port in the back and I don't have a plug. Do 40 pin DOMs need external power?

Would an 8GB CF card like this work? https://www.amazon.com/Compact-Flash-8GBCF-Ca … y/dp/B0CRL3KCV9

There was also this 4GB one: https://www.amazon.com/Compact-Flash-Memory-C … /dp/B09P76VPZJ/

These are what use. Verbatim, SanDisk, and Cisco (industrial) cards.

Tempest wrote on 2024-07-09, 14:07:

Pino wrote on 2024-07-09, 13:19:

A SD to IDE adapter and a SD card is good enough and cheaper than a CF card.

Are there any compatibility issues to watch out for? SD cards come in a variety of speeds and specs.

The common Sintechi SD-IDE bridges are limited internally to 25MB/s. That means they are:
1) plenty fast for anything up through UDMA2 on the IDE side
2) slower than just about any legit SD card made in the past 10 years
So while you might be able to measure a small performance variation between a fast sd and an average sd card using synthetic benchmarks, it's going to be a relatively small difference ( unless you get some grey market garbage that just broken) Ideally you would want an SD <= 8GB for compatibility. Plugging a larger SD card in to a Pentium can be tricky and the SD-IDE bridge itself isn't able to reliably work with SDs > 128GB.

If you go with CF's, I found that the 512MB Memory Partner CF's are very good at the old DMA modes common in the late 486, socket 5, socket 7 period. The memory partner 2GB and 4GB CF's were good too.

Dumb question but on my Pentium 1 I'm using Windows 98 SE (my 486 is for pure DOS games). What's the largest CF card that I can use with it? I know Windows 98 can recognize larger hard drives than DOS 6.22 could. I assume that for Pentium 1 era games that DOS 7 is just fine.

Also that StarTech CF adapter looks like it has a rear mount that goes in a card slot. Since I don't have any bays free on the front of my machines this would be ideal. Has anyone tried to do this before?

The limiting factor won't be windows 98, but the BIOS. The max size is something like 32GB for most PCs of the Pentium era.

devius wrote on 2024-07-09, 22:12:

The limiting factor won't be windows 98, but the BIOS. The max size is something like 32GB for most PCs of the Pentium era.

Ah ok. 32GB would be more than enough. I'm thinking more like 8GB or 16GB.

Tempest wrote on 2024-07-09, 19:34:

Dumb question but on my Pentium 1 I'm using Windows 98 SE (my 486 is for pure DOS games). What's the largest CF card that I can use with it? I know Windows 98 can recognize larger hard drives than DOS 6.22 could. I assume that for Pentium 1 era games that DOS 7 is just fine.

Also that StarTech CF adapter looks like it has a rear mount that goes in a card slot. Since I don't have any bays free on the front of my machines this would be ideal. Has anyone tried to do this before?

devius is correct.
If you google which motherboard you have and max size hard drive, it should tell you the largest supported drive, earlier motherboards had 8GB limit and reached upto 128GB with SS7
Worst case tell us which motherboard here and someone will know.

Dos 7 is fine, In fact I use it on one of my 486's as well.

I don't have the startech branded adapter but it has the Master/slave jumper which is the style of adapter I've had most success with.

chinny22 wrote on 2024-07-10, 01:05:

If you google which motherboard you have and max size hard drive, it should tell you the largest supported drive, earlier motherboards had 8GB limit and reached upto 128GB with SS7
Worst case tell us which motherboard here and someone will know.

It's an IBM Personal Computer 350. Model # is 6587-L8V. The BIOS is IBM Surepath. BIOS says the board identifier is 3TIBJB2MK6U. Flash EEPROM Rev Level is LVKT38AUS. BIOS date is 9/2/99.

I guess the system is a Type 6585: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/ibm-pc … eries-type-6585

Note that there are two kinds of BIOS size limits. Sometimes, if you're happy with it, you can just settle for only using a small portion of the drive and ignore the rest even though the drive is much larger. The 528MB and 8.4GB limits are like that. The other kind of limit is when there is a bug in the BIOS (such as integer overflow or an infinite loop leading to a hang) when the drive exceeds a certain size. The 32GB limit is like that, although some BIOS versions (especially Phoenix) have a few other limits like that somewhere between 2 and 32GB.

Hmm... Looks like it might be 8GB. That's the size of the hard drive I have in there now (or at least how much it sees) so that makes sense.

Surepath bios 8gb HDD limit?