First post, by murrayman
Forget about speed and wear, I’m just talking about stability, reliability, and consistency in terms of functioning, cause good gravy have I been having nightmare issues as of late.
So I’ve got a handful of those FC 1.4 SD to IDE converters that I’ve bought off eBay over the past few years, and every single one behaves differently. One requires me to have no SD card in it, let BIOS attempt to detect drive, fail, then insert while on and soft reboot to get it to work - if you power off, the only way it’ll work is to repeat the cycle. Another one requires me to have an SD card in it, attempt a read and fail, remove and reinsert, soft reboot, THEN it’ll work. Another one works normally every time without fail. And another one does just fine sometimes, and other times either prevents the BIOS from posting at all, or will intermittently corrupt text on screen in a boot attempt.
The one single CF card reader I have… works? I think? I only have 2010 and earlier CF cards to test, and they are all 133 or lower speed rating (one I think has data corruption as W95 explorer.exe randomly crashes), so no modern SanDisk Extreme Pro’s here yet. But so far, it seems to just work.
I invested in SD card readers instead of CF in the late 2010s due to recommendations of speed and, from what I gathered on forums at least, reliability. Which the latter always seemed odd to me just because you’re relying on silicon between you and the card to make things work, versus CF which is a direct mechanical connection. But so far, SD cards have SUCKED for me on every machine I have, sans that one consistently working one I have.
I searched up and saw a few threads regarding SD vs CF speed and preference from a few years back, but I want to know for this year what are people’s preferences, and is my experience uncommon? As well, is there a preferred brand of SD and CF card readers? Haven’t found any statistically significant verdicts as such yet.
P3B-F 1.04, PIII 1k, 512MB PC133, GF DDR 32MB + DM3DII 12MB SLI, SB0100
P3B-F 1.03, PIII 700, 384MB PC100, V5 AGP, SB0160
CP 5170, PII 350, 256MB PC100, Rage LT 2MB, ESS 1869
PB M S610, PMMX 233, 128MB EDO66, DM3D 4MB, Aztech