I use 2GB CF card with Win98SE on my P-233MMX laptop. Works fine.

That adapter should be good.

Some pentium boards/bios had probles with HDD's larger then 8GB. New versions of BIOS helped. Some also had problems with HDD's bigger then 38GB and finally larger then 128GB.

It's just okay. A mechanical HDD will perform better, even some old UDMA66 types, probably.

2.5" form factor and a 1995 era interface, CF does shine.

wouldn't a modern flash based CF be faster than any IDE drive?

Also I keep seeing on ebay, Western Digital 2 and 4gb PATA SSD's these would also seem to be a great idea at giving a retro system an upgrade without adapters.

How is the wear and tear on a CF card, Ive been warned several times that the card will wear out extremely fast due to the windows swap file ,and not to attempt CF with win9x ?

CF do work fine under Windows 98 😀

Wear and tear might be an issue, I don't think I've used a CF card long enough to make any comment in that regard. Personally I like to use CF for pure DOS and for Windows 98 SATA drives with SATA to IDE converters.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Personally I like to use CF for pure DOS and for Windows 98 SATA drives with SATA to IDE converters.

Second that 😀

Dos I know of 😀

I haven't had any issues even ran osx tiger off a CF card and it took a long time before it showed signs of wear (lost performance but data was fine). I like CF cards that they are so easy to work with.

Yup, I also ran OS9 from an 4GB CF card. Worked like a charm. ^^
Windows 98 and ME also worked, but *sometime* access was a bit jerky (for example,very short task bar and explorer freezes).
Probably because Windows was writing/reading a lot in the background at the same time. On Windows 3.1 no jerkyness, so far.