Here in the US they are not hard to find, including in brick&mortar stores... I use a chain store brand, MicroCenter... sometimes I go there to pick up stuff in person (if I have other stuff to pick up too, it's not particularly close to me) but more often I just order their SD cards from Amazon, never had a problem with those. They are not the fastest ever but they are reasonably priced and reliable. Sorry that doesn't address your problem in the UK though. I just checked amazon.co.uk and that brand of SD cards is not available there.

(edit) here is the exact listing on Amazon US where I buy mine https://www.amazon.com/Center-Memory-Adapter- … e/dp/B08C2G1J9M

Tried Tesco?

(I did, when I was in Scotland a couple of months ago; the only thing I found edible there were garlic shrimp 😜 )

justin1985 wrote on 2025-01-21, 19:33:

Last year I could happily pick up SD cards for reasonable prices in any number of bricks and mortar stores here in the UK. Argos […]
Show full quote

Last year I could happily pick up SD cards for reasonable prices in any number of bricks and mortar stores here in the UK. Argos, the catalogue store, always had a wide range pretty much as cheap as Amazon, and you could always also find them in supermarkets and pharmacies, stationery and DIY stores.

Today I needed another card and thought I'd just pick one up on my way home from work. Argos no longer sell them, Boots the pharmacy chain, list them online but don't have any stock at any stores. Even Currys the main UK electronics store hardly had any stock at any of their central London stores. I ended up getting a small 32Gb card for £9.99 at Robert Dyas (a household/DIY store) - that seems kind of expensive to me - I'm sure I was paying around that for 128Gb at Argos last year!

Did the industry suddenly decide SD cards are no longer mainstream? I thought there was still quite a demand for them for dash cams, GoPros, wireless security cameras etc?

They even seem to have got a bit more expensive and less of a range on eBay and Amazon ... and I'm always suspicious of fakes there ...

Time to stock up?

best place in the UK is either currys though i guess that depends on the location im on the south coast, or try novatech not sure if theres any near london my local portsmouth store always has a good selection, though i havent checked recently, last time i picked up a 32GB it was like 4 pound something.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a position to need an SD card immediately, so likely would have just used Amazon Prime, however if I did ever need one in a pinch, I’d nip into CEX and grab a used one. CEX’s warranty is excellent and if it was only to tide me over until I could get the card I wanted from somewhere else, it’d more than likely last long enough.

Fake SD cards are so prevalent on Amazon and other online stores, I can understand the reluctance to buy them there. Especially since Amazon has been known to mix stock from legitimate sources with counterfeit.

I haven't had any more issues with troublesome SD cards since I quit buying them online. While I still hear from people I know getting SD cards that don't work or have strange compatibility issues when they buy online.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2025-01-21, 23:12:

Tried Tesco?

Actually no, as there aren't any bigger than Tesco Express anywhere near my home (South London) or office (Central London). I did look in branches of Sainsburys and Waitrose that I definitely remember selling them before. It seems to be a general thing though doesn't it? High Street retailers deciding en-masse that SD cards are no longer worth stocking? So If Tesco Extras do still sell them now, days might be numbered?

paradigital wrote on 2025-01-22, 19:36:

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a position to need an SD card immediately, so likely would have just used Amazon Prime, however if I did ever need one in a pinch, I’d nip into CEX and grab a used one. CEX’s warranty is excellent and if it was only to tide me over until I could get the card I wanted from somewhere else, it’d more than likely last long enough.

Good shout! CEX probably would be the best option - suspect their own-brand new cables etc range probably includes SD cards too?

akimmet wrote on 2025-01-22, 20:49:

Fake SD cards are so prevalent on Amazon and other online stores, I can understand the reluctance to buy them there. Especially since Amazon has been known to mix stock from legitimate sources with counterfeit.

I haven't had any more issues with troublesome SD cards since I quit buying them online. While I still hear from people I know getting SD cards that don't work or have strange compatibility issues when they buy online.

This is exactly what I had in mind - not least with the general ensh*tification of Amazon, which makes it hard work to distinguish what is a random third party seller and what has been sourced (hopefully legitimately) by Amazon themselves - which is getting rarer and rarer to find anyway. Amazon really feels like it has passed the point of no longer being useful for most things - you can't find the legitimate stuff amongst the made up brands and random sellers, and the identical no-name stuff is always also on eBay, for cheaper. If I really need something urgently, these days I'll either find a bricks and mortar store locally or many things I'll order from Argos for free same-day collection at the Sainsburys Local 5 mins walk away.

For SD cards, after paying the £9.99 for the 32Gb card at Robert Dyas, I ordered a load from AliExpress - but specifically sought out listings where the reviews included people posting screenshots of H2testw verifying capacity. Actually I decided to add spare 40-pin and 44-pin SD-IDE adapters to the order too, and found that it really took a lot of digging to find them, when in the past there were loads of similar listings for them ....

I bought a 256Gb Sd card for £15.29 from amazon. It was their Amazon basics brand. I am still filling it up with CD Images. But so far, it's been fine.

justin1985 wrote on 2025-01-23, 15:44:

Actually no, as there aren't any bigger than Tesco Express anywhere near my home (South London) or office (Central London). I di […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2025-01-21, 23:12:

Tried Tesco?

Actually no, as there aren't any bigger than Tesco Express anywhere near my home (South London) or office (Central London). I did look in branches of Sainsburys and Waitrose that I definitely remember selling them before. It seems to be a general thing though doesn't it? High Street retailers deciding en-masse that SD cards are no longer worth stocking? So If Tesco Extras do still sell them now, days might be numbered?

paradigital wrote on 2025-01-22, 19:36:

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a position to need an SD card immediately, so likely would have just used Amazon Prime, however if I did ever need one in a pinch, I’d nip into CEX and grab a used one. CEX’s warranty is excellent and if it was only to tide me over until I could get the card I wanted from somewhere else, it’d more than likely last long enough.

Good shout! CEX probably would be the best option - suspect their own-brand new cables etc range probably includes SD cards too?

akimmet wrote on 2025-01-22, 20:49:

Fake SD cards are so prevalent on Amazon and other online stores, I can understand the reluctance to buy them there. Especially since Amazon has been known to mix stock from legitimate sources with counterfeit.

I haven't had any more issues with troublesome SD cards since I quit buying them online. While I still hear from people I know getting SD cards that don't work or have strange compatibility issues when they buy online.

This is exactly what I had in mind - not least with the general ensh*tification of Amazon, which makes it hard work to distinguish what is a random third party seller and what has been sourced (hopefully legitimately) by Amazon themselves - which is getting rarer and rarer to find anyway. Amazon really feels like it has passed the point of no longer being useful for most things - you can't find the legitimate stuff amongst the made up brands and random sellers, and the identical no-name stuff is always also on eBay, for cheaper. If I really need something urgently, these days I'll either find a bricks and mortar store locally or many things I'll order from Argos for free same-day collection at the Sainsburys Local 5 mins walk away.

For SD cards, after paying the £9.99 for the 32Gb card at Robert Dyas, I ordered a load from AliExpress - but specifically sought out listings where the reviews included people posting screenshots of H2testw verifying capacity. Actually I decided to add spare 40-pin and 44-pin SD-IDE adapters to the order too, and found that it really took a lot of digging to find them, when in the past there were loads of similar listings for them ....

You not living near a normal size Tesco doesnt mean they are not a easy to buy item.

They are literally sold in a supermarket.
I bought an HP T5720 a few months ago, I was running it from an SD card, the 44pin to SD adapter I got off ebay and the 32Gb SD card I bought off Tesco, it was delivered with my weekly food shop. All my groceries and an SD card.

Are their days numbered.
Well yeah nothing lasts forever. But its going to be a long long time before I start thinking I need to buy one now before they become a hard to find item.

I've never understood why people like SD so much. CF is native ATA, SD has to be translated, so is it really faster?

debs3759 wrote on 2025-01-23, 19:44:

I've never understood why people like SD so much. CF is native ATA, SD has to be translated, so is it really faster?

I dont. I used an SD card because I watched the philscomputerlab video about it and he seemed to perfer it.
I now run my T5720 on a CF card.
There seems to be no difference with speed on that system.

debs3759 wrote on 2025-01-23, 19:44:

I've never understood why people like SD so much. CF is native ATA, SD has to be translated, so is it really faster?

I've never seen speed as an advantage (or disadvantage) - just more cost effective and more convenient.

CF cards have really got harder to find and more expensive. Looking on eBay UK now the vast majority are second hand shipping from China - most of the others local stock second hand of varying quality. I'm sure most probably would be OK in practice, but that doesn't seem the most trustworthy way of buying storage.

For 40-pin IDE if you only want one adapter then the SD- IDE adapter and the off-brand SATA-IDE adapters (which seem to have a reputation for being flakier than the expensive Startech) are the main options, right? Funnily enough for 44-pin there are more options - I like the mSATA to 44-pin adapters for a nice neat solution.

My thoughts on CF vs SD performance:

Compact Flash:
I classify things into three rough groups

• Industrial CF (Firmware > 2008) tuned for small files. Some are tuned for writes, some are tuned for reads, but they all work pretty well. Latency ranges between 0.3ms to 0.6ms. Transcend 44pin Pata SSD and 40 pin DOM devices perform similarly to this group because they use similar flash and flash controllers, just in a different form factor.
• Camera CF's tuned for different operating modes. True IDE performance seems like an afterthought on these devices. Latency ranges from 0.5ms to 7.0ms. WMDA is often not supported.
• Old CF's (Firmware 1995 - 2005) Thing like the Western Digital Silicon drive were pretty cool in 2002, but the flash and flash controllers used in these devices are noticeably slower than stuff that came out a few years later.

Within each of these groups, there's still a wide ecology of controllers, firmware & flash. The best are great. The worst are not as great for anything other than DOS & Win 3.1

SD-IDE bridges
There's pretty much only one game in town these days and that's the Sintech devices.

• Good latency. 0.3ms to 0.6ms range depending on your SD
• Similar performance regardless of what SD you use because the bridge talks to the SD card at the "High Speed" standard from 2003 which limits transfer rates to 25MB/s.
• Supports WDMA with most EIDE controllers. Sometimes early EIDE controllers don't like these devices (CMD640?)
• Doesn't have a full LBA48 implementation so using storage > 128GB will result in problems.

The uniformity of these devices is kind of a benefit. You know what you are going to get.

The other option is a bridged Sata SSD.

• Great latency. 0.15ms to 0.3ms
• Transfer rates that saturate any PATA mode
• Outside of certain Marvell bridges, WDMA modes won't work

There are some performance differences between buffered and non buffered SSDs, but it's less noticeable when using a PATA bridge. You probably want to go this route for things newer than Win98.

Which is best?

Much of it depends on your computer and IDE controller. The same device on a different controller can produce different results. Here's some generalities:

• I have an ISA controller! You probably have large enough CPU bottleneck that you can only tell the difference between the solid state storage device families when using a benchmark.
• Mid 486 VLB PIO 3 to Pentium II UDMA/33 controllers: Camera CF's and Old CF's can feel slower. Everything else is competitive unless you are having WDMA issues and that's complicated.
• Pentium III UDMA/66 and faster: Sata SSD's start to pull ahead of everything except for the very best industrial CF's & DOMS.

https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Storage# … Retro_Computers

douglar wrote on 2025-01-24, 15:24:

My thoughts on CF vs SD performance:

Thanks for that explanation. Looks like I need to do my own comparisons for each of the retro systems (from 386 up to the latest non SATA systems I have), and it sounds like I also need to test all my box full of old CF cards (not a massive box, but several dozen more cards than I need, when I find them) before I start selling off my surplus, so buyers who know what's what can make an educated purchase 😀

I even have a couple of REVO drives (PCI-E) somewhere that need testing for early PCI-E 1 and 2 systems 😀