As far as I understand it, a CF Adapter provides the card with electricity and connection. Its basically "cables".

All the I/O is handled by the PCs IDE controller. So if it doesn't work, usually it isn't the adapter, but the card and the controller of your PC (and its bios) don't get along.

I personally prefer the backslot type, since you can unplug the card without opening the case. Comes handy when you have to transfer data, another disk image or whatever from your main machine.

I would chose the CF cards to be quick writers. While reading may make no difference for the retro machine, in your modern machine you can swap disk images much faster.

You might also prefer the size to be compatible with your Bios abilities. However, I found ways to get a 1 GB CF card to work with my 500MB limit - but I waste half the card.

For no special reason, I choose Transcend 133x. I have 2GB and 4GB models. They work well for DOS. However, there seems to be a performance hit in Windows 98. I wouldn't recommend them for this O.S. Instead, I would recommend you get an almost silent HDD, such as a 5400 RPM laptop style HDD, or a small capacity (eg 80GB) desktop model.

I have also used very old CF cards, dating back to Windows 95. They are 128MB in size. They don't like being set to LBA inside the mobo's BIOS set up area options. Instead, they work when this HDD setting is set to "Normal".

Idea: choose a CF up to 8GB in size for DOS, and a quiet and small capacity (single platter) HDD for Windows 9x.

I use the ones you can see in the "retro gear I just bought" thread...

I got the cheapes CF cards (2 and 4 GB). The 4GB is much faster. As to CF > IDE adapters they all work. At first I though the adapter needs to support DMA, but that isn't true I just had 1 CF card that doesn't do DMA (so it's quite slow).

You fdisk and format it like a normal IDE drive. It's quite smooth to be honest!

There are adapters which you can install on the rear bracket, so you can pull out the CF card and load software onto it through your desktop. Quite handy

I use one CF2IDE adaptor in my main retro pc which is a pentium 233. I have fitted a transcend 300x 2gb card. Now in terms of speed, it's really fast compared to the machine's contemporary IDE drives (2-4GB). But I tried it at my Pentium 3, where I have a WD 40GB, and it was slower than the physical disk. So I guess it's perfect on pre-dma66 systems. In my pentium 233, I use also a real 2gb HDD, which is only for DOS(plus that I like the original working sound of a physical disk 😀 ) , and the CF is only for windows 98 se. Which I have to mention that loads completely in 22".

I strongly recommend Hitachi Microdrives instead of CF cards for DOS systems. Hitachi and Seagate Microdrive transfer rates are as fast as PIO-4 goes so that is not a problem. Hitachi has better seek times (about 12ms avarage) but Seagate has 2MB cache. Unfortunately Seagates do not work as slave drives. Avoid Magicstor Microdrives. They have slow transfer rates, horrible seek times and they don't work as slave drives. I have several 6 GB Hitachi Microdrives and I highly recommend them. You can find them very cheap on ebay. Just make sure to get models with CF connector.

CF cards can be problematic. Some of them do not work as slaves but that is not usually a problem. The problem is unreliable writes. Sometimes slow CF cards might require several seconds for writing with no obvious reason and this will cause BIOS timeouts. Large and fast CF cards are much more expensive than 6GB Hitachi Microdrives so I see no good reason to use CF card.

Hitachi Microdrives are noiseless, inexpensive, they work just as a real hard disk, have good transfer rates and not too bad seek times. What more can you hope for?

Interesting. I must admit I have never heard of Hitachi Microdrives. I did some basic research, and there's a Wikipedia webpage about them here. It discusses Pros and Cons about these devices.

Laptop harddrives are another option. IDE adapters are very cheap and the drives are usually pretty quiet and also available in small sizes.

If you have a few lying around I would go with this option.

Micro drives are very good, but when I was looking for some they where a bit rare and not as cheap per GB compared to CF. A new 4 GB CF card is only ~ 20 bucks shipped. IMO this is exellent value. For DOS they are very good, I have used them for W98SE and they also work fine although I am not sure about the longterm.

See 250608281056 at ebay. Those are the good Hitachi Microdrives I mentioned. No way you get fast CFs that cheap.

Well these are 2nd hand. The CF cards I mentioned are brand new.

Still that's a very good price, no doubt. I didn't come accross anything priced that well when I was looking 🙁

Nice find!

PS: He seems to have a lot of drives. Handy auction!

Thanks all, I got a couple of adapters off ebay, just need the flash cards now as it turned out what I thought was an old cf card was actually smartmedia when I got it out 😢, too many damn formats around.

I'm guessing any cf card should be ok, but I wonder how to set it up in the bios. My 386 doesn't have autodetect. Do I need to put in sectors etc and will anything do as long as it adds up to something the mobo can handle?

I'm guessing any cf card should be ok

Generally speaking. But you do have to be careful with some of the older ones, as not all of them supported fixed-disk mode. I don't think that applies to any of the ones you can buy nowadays, though.

Your analysis is correct, just set the geometry to whatever gets you the nearest to the actual capacity of the drive.

This thread has got me thinking. I have several old mother boards but not enough IDE hard drives to go around. I've also been looking for a convenient way to get large files to and from my DOS systems which aren't on my network. I'm surprised there are no CF > IDE adapters that mount in the floppy bay. That would be more convenient than moving the entire system to reach for the back of it.

There are USB to CF readers for the floppy bay. I use one of them in my main desktop.

On my Retro PC the best I could find is a IDE to CF reader for the rear bracket.

I see that there are also SD > IDE adapters. SD cards appear to be cheaper though harder to find a speed rating. I started looking for a good comparison between these types of cards.

Unfortunately what I've seen isn't very informative.

In principle this makes their maximum possible transfer speed slower, but in practice there is little difference when used with current digital cameras.

That's nice but what if I want to compare them for use in something other than a camera?

I chose CF because I know that they will work with the BIOS and booting is also supported.

I found that the SD adapters are pricier, but the cards cheaper and with CF it's the other way round.

The CF solution works really well for me (tried heaps of boards with no issues whatsoever) so that's why I recommend it.

Another option are notebook HDDs. A 2.5 > 3.25" IDE adapter is cheap as chips and notebook HDDs are also quite easy to obtain or you might got one lying around already.

From what I read on the Internet, platter drivers seem to be recommended for Windows and CF cards are fine with DOS because DOS hardly ever writes to the drive (apart from the programs you use).

Another cheap option for moving data into retro PCs is Iomega ZIP. Especially the parallel port drives. They are very cheap (nobody uses parallel port anymore), much cheaper than the SCSI, USB or IDE versions.

They also "just work" with any machine that has a parallel port. But it needs to be a 386 I believe? Doesn't work on a 286 I read somewhere...

You just need to run guest.exe and BAM you have a drive letter. In contrast do CF cards you can remove the drive whenever you want. CF cards you need to shut down the machine and remove the card.

IDE and SCSI ZIP drives should be fast enough to install DOS and games. I believe that the higher capacity drives are faster (e.g. 750MB) but they also cost a lot more. Wheras the 100MB parallel ports don't sell well at all. So great for the buyer!

I would personally choose a microdrive or laptop hard drive over a CF card.... CF cards are no good when it comes to long term use involving lots of reading/writing. They can wear down quickly if used heavily! Real HDD's and microdrives don't have this problem (although there is a slight risk of mechancial falure).

Some recent CF cards have a wear levelling controller built in... this evens out wear levels instead of constantly writing to the same area's of the CF card.

About those microdrives, are they not sold/made anymore ?
New I mean.
Can't seem to find any, or searching for the wrong names perhaps... (?)

*

To answer my own question.... :

http://www.magneticdiskheritagecenter.org/MDH … 0MICRODRIVE.htm

CF cards are no good when it comes to long term use involving lots of reading/writing. They can wear down quickly if used heavily!

That's true for the average cheap CF card, but it's possible to find CF cards that use SLC flash, which is far more durable.

As for the microdrives, I believe they went completely out of production a couple years ago, and IMO nothing of value was lost. They were incredibly slow and not particularly reliable. If you need a small, quiet drive but don't want to trust flash, stick with notebook hard drives.

Has anyone tried using a CF-> IDE adapter with Dynamic Drive Overlay to give >504MB support on old motherboards that don't support drives larger than this?