Hello there...

I'm having a bit of an issue with one of these SD to IDE adapters that I'm hoping someone will have figured out the answer to...

I can install Win 2000 and boot to the SD card just fine, it's just that it takes an absolute age to do it.

Atto seems to show somewhat reasonable results, 0.5kb clocking in at about 4000, and each subsequent step going up in speed from there, up to the expected max of 25000 ish for the larger chunks. Yes, I'm operating un UDMA mode, and adjusting the modes down to just regular DMA does lower the speeds reported by Atto.

Booting the machine is reasonably quick, but anything that requires a write operation takes forever. For example, installing Win2k takes over an hour. Trying to install MS Works 8.0 (about 500mb) also takes a rediculous amount of time.
After copying a 200mb exe to the desktop, if I then copy that file, it takes upwards of 45 mins to just create a copy of it on the desktop.
I know writing is slower, but this is just unbearable.

I've done some reading of the forums (probably not enough) and have taken the following steps...

SD to IDE is the only device connected on the IDE cable. It's on the primary, and is on the first channel.
Tried changing the DMA settings in the bios.
Tried formatting the SD card with both FAT32 and NTFS.
Tried formatting the SD card in my main machine as NTFS (I seem to remember flash storage needing a partition offset to get the best performance).
Tried installing XP.
Tried multiple different SD and MicroSD cards ( MicroSD with an adapter). Cards tried are all Class 10, UHS 1 or better.

Some observations... After formatting one of the cards with the Win2k installer, then putting it in my main machine, It would only accept files at a rate of about 50-100kb/s. To restor the full speed of the SD card, I formatted it in my main machine. This bought speeds up to 25MB/s+.

I understand that an SD to IDE won't be the fastest thing in the world. But it shouldn't take an hour to copy/duplicate a 200mb file. It's basically unusuable. I gave up trying to install Works from CD after it got past an hour.

The machine is a Compaq EVO D300, P4 1.6ghz, 512mb ram which was previously working fine. I still have the original HDD and while it works, it screams like a wailing banshee. But it was faster than this SD card adapter.

Am I expecting too much? Should I just cut my losses and find a reasonable IDE drive on Ebay?