murrayman wrote on 2023-01-25, 02:22:

Alright, gonna only get Startech CF to IDE adapters moving forward direct from Amazon warehouse and not third-party. […]
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Alright, gonna only get Startech CF to IDE adapters moving forward direct from Amazon warehouse and not third-party.

As far as CF, I'm hearing either old stock or industrial is the best way to go. I have two Transcend CF cards as well - one 8GB 133x and one 4GB 133x - and I have had issues with one already, so I would prefer to go whatever way is best moving forward. The other one I have that's been stable for a while is a 4GB Lexar, which is actually above 133x after all, it's rated 200x and from 2010 - also has always felt significantly faster than the others in either FPIO or DMA mode, so now that makes sense.

kolderman wrote on 2023-01-24, 21:59:

I only use industrial CF cards and they have been rock solid.

What brand do you use? I don't see any SanDisk branded "industrial" cards on Amazon, and they're the only brand I've gone with thus far plus getting direct from warehouse so I'm not getting any counterfeits. Are there other solid brands I should be looking at?

Sold and shipped by Amazon is a good starting point, but not a guarantee . I always test with H2TESTW and run benchmarks .

darry wrote on 2023-01-27, 03:35:

Not crazy, but slow for a P4 . I suggest a SATA SSD with an adapter. Marvell chipset, or maybe JMicron if your board's chipset likes it .

Slow? The ide ports on that motherboard (P4S5A-DX+ SiS 645DX / 961B) are very slow, they are ata 100 nominal but when I tried an ssd with an adapter the performance were between ata33-ata66 (I opened a topic about it some years ago).
I won't need to have a fast disk performance, but I prefer to be able to easily switch the files and in case the corruption is due to the motherboard (but I doubt) not having hard time to fix the stuff, with a sd I can take it off from the test pc and connect to my daily pc with an adapter, launch the chkdsk and hopefully fix the issue (that's what I have to do almost every time now that I'm using this probably dieing hard drive).

Nemo1985 wrote on 2023-01-27, 03:43:

darry wrote on 2023-01-27, 03:35:

Not crazy, but slow for a P4 . I suggest a SATA SSD with an adapter. Marvell chipset, or maybe JMicron if your board's chipset likes it .

Slow? The ide ports on that motherboard (P4S5A-DX+ SiS 645DX / 961B) are very slow, they are ata 100 nominal but when I tried an ssd with an adapter the performance were between ata33-ata66 (I opened a topic about it some years ago).
I won't need to have a fast disk performance, but I prefer to be able to easily switch the files and in case the corruption is due to the motherboard (but I doubt) not having hard time to fix the stuff, with a sd I can take it off from the test pc and connect to my daily pc with an adapter, launch the chkdsk and hopefully fix the issue (that's what I have to do almost every time now that I'm using this probably dieing hard drive).

SATA to IDE adapters based on the ubiquitous FC1307A are limited to ATA33 in theory and perform significantly below even ATA33 limits in practice Re: Here's an idea: using high endurance (micro)SD cards meant for continuous video recording as storage for retro gear . If that is fast enough for you, don't worry and be happy .

darry wrote on 2023-01-28, 03:41:

SATA to IDE adapters based on the ubiquitous FC1307A are limited to ATA33 in theory and perform significantly below even ATA33 limits in practice Re: Here's an idea: using high endurance (micro)SD cards meant for continuous video recording as storage for retro gear . If that is fast enough for you, don't worry and be happy .

I get speeds better than ATA33 with Sata to ide adapters that use the common Jmicro Sata Pata bridge.

FC1307a is an SD to Pata IDE adapter that is limitted to an 25mb/s SD read speed.

But these are two different things.

douglar wrote on 2023-01-28, 05:13:

I get speeds better than ATA33 with Sata to ide adapters that use the common Jmicro Sata Pata bridge. […]
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darry wrote on 2023-01-28, 03:41:

SATA to IDE adapters based on the ubiquitous FC1307A are limited to ATA33 in theory and perform significantly below even ATA33 limits in practice Re: Here's an idea: using high endurance (micro)SD cards meant for continuous video recording as storage for retro gear . If that is fast enough for you, don't worry and be happy .

I get speeds better than ATA33 with Sata to ide adapters that use the common Jmicro Sata Pata bridge.

FC1307a is an SD to Pata IDE adapter that is limitted to an 25mb/s SD read speed.

But these are two different things.

Not disagreeing. For a fast Pentium 3 or a Pentium 4, IDE to SATA makes more sense, IMHO, from a performance point of view, but Nemo1985's use case and preferences might be better served by an adapted SD card .

@Nemo1985 Keep in mind that you can use and adapted SATA SSD in the retro machine and plug into a USB to SATA adapter to connect to modern PC when needed .

darry wrote on 2023-01-28, 05:47:

douglar wrote on 2023-01-28, 05:13:

I get speeds better than ATA33 with Sata to ide adapters that use the common Jmicro Sata Pata bridge. […]
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darry wrote on 2023-01-28, 03:41:

SATA to IDE adapters based on the ubiquitous FC1307A are limited to ATA33 in theory and perform significantly below even ATA33 limits in practice Re: Here's an idea: using high endurance (micro)SD cards meant for continuous video recording as storage for retro gear . If that is fast enough for you, don't worry and be happy .

I get speeds better than ATA33 with Sata to ide adapters that use the common Jmicro Sata Pata bridge.

FC1307a is an SD to Pata IDE adapter that is limitted to an 25mb/s SD read speed.

But these are two different things.

Not disagreeing. For a fast Pentium 3 or a Pentium 4, IDE to SATA makes more sense, IMHO, from a performance point of view, but Nemo1985's use case and preferences might be better served by an adapted SD card .

@Nemo1985 Keep in mind that you can use and adapted SATA SSD in the retro machine and plug into a USB to SATA adapter to connect to modern PC when needed .

That's right, but still despite the motherboard officially support the ata133 those were the performance I was able to achieve with an ssd:
SSD with winxp and ide adapter

As you suggested it may be because of the sata-ide adapter but still, it wasn't worth it.

Nemo1985 wrote on 2023-01-28, 05:59:

That's right, but still despite the motherboard officially support the ata133 those were the performance I was able to achieve with an ssd:
SSD with winxp and ide adapter

Not sure about SiS chipsets, but I know from experience that JMicron based SATA to IDE adapters don't get along with certain VIA chipsets, like the KT133A. An adapter based on the Marvell chip works much better in that situation, but they tend to be more expensive and are somewhat harder to find.

Nemo1985 wrote on 2023-01-28, 05:59:

That's right, but still despite the motherboard officially support the ata133 those were the performance I was able to achieve w […]
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darry wrote on 2023-01-28, 05:47:

douglar wrote on 2023-01-28, 05:13:

I get speeds better than ATA33 with Sata to ide adapters that use the common Jmicro Sata Pata bridge. […]
Show full quote

I get speeds better than ATA33 with Sata to ide adapters that use the common Jmicro Sata Pata bridge.

FC1307a is an SD to Pata IDE adapter that is limitted to an 25mb/s SD read speed.

But these are two different things.

Not disagreeing. For a fast Pentium 3 or a Pentium 4, IDE to SATA makes more sense, IMHO, from a performance point of view, but Nemo1985's use case and preferences might be better served by an adapted SD card .

@Nemo1985 Keep in mind that you can use and adapted SATA SSD in the retro machine and plug into a USB to SATA adapter to connect to modern PC when needed .

That's right, but still despite the motherboard officially support the ata133 those were the performance I was able to achieve with an ssd:
SSD with winxp and ide adapter

As you suggested it may be because of the sata-ide adapter but still, it wasn't worth it.

90MB/second (your results with an adapted SATA SSD) vs 24MB/second for sequential read (SD card on FC1307A), for example seems like a significant performance difference to me.

Whether it is worth it is, of course, a matter of opinion.

The only problem i have experienced was when using a cheapo CF > SD adapter in my Pentium 1 Fujitsu PC. On startup i was greeted with a constant beeping and if I dont remember things wrong something happened in the bios which forced me to reset it to default settings. An easy workaround was to use the adapter in my camera instead and a real CF-card in the PC. But it still annoys me.

Baleog wrote on 2023-01-28, 08:02:

The only problem i have experienced was when using a cheapo CF > SD adapter in my Pentium 1 Fujitsu PC. On startup i was greeted with a constant beeping and if I dont remember things wrong something happened in the bios which forced me to reset it to default settings. An easy workaround was to use the adapter in my camera instead and a real CF-card in the PC. But it still annoys me.

I think your experience is not that uncommon. Storage devices built in the 2010's often have a "compatibility blind spot" for the early EIDE controllers that came out between 1994 to 1996. I don't know what to do in these cases other than use a different storage device.

Similarly, a lot of storage controllers built after 2000 have trouble with some of the early EIDE devices built in the 1993-1996 range. Usually you can fix this if you can force your controller away from autodetecting LBA addressing and force it to use CHS (aka Normal or Large ) addressing.

So I went ahead with the cf card->sd project on my pentium 4 machine.
I had some issues with the following chain: SD->SD adapter->Cf adapter->Cf to ide (the one you screw on the backpanel). The bios was hanging after some reboots, I tried several cables since I was initially using a 80 pin eide cable, switched back to a 40 eide cable but the issue was still there. I switched the Micro SD adapter from an apacher one to a samsung but I also did switched from this adapter:

To this adapter:

You know less stuff you have, less stuff can give issues. I partitioned the microsd as following:
Win98 partition in fat32
WinXP partition in NTFS
Data partition in fat32.

Windows xp works fine, while windows 98 is a disaster since the boot, windows 98 scandisk complain about lba (which is active in bios), I tried to install windows 98 from the original cd-rom and during the installation a "like" bios screen complained about a sever disk error.
For compatibility purpose I used pio mode 3, lba mode and 32 bit access enabled (in the bios). Unlucky the bios doesn't have the udma disable mode (or is it the 32 bit access?), I also disabled the block mode (which gave me issues in another machine with a cf card).

When I try to boot on windows 98 (dos 7.10) it says: Unable to find the sector during read on unit c.
Also when I boot on windows98\dos7 the other fat32 partition is not visible (data fat32) why is that?

I am not surprised that your SD->SD adapter-> Cf bridge->Cf to ide stack had issues.

The CF->IDE adapter that you show does not look like it has a voltage regulator on it. It can only provide 5V power.

My experience has been that Type 1 SD->CF bridges require a CF->IDE adapter that can provide 3.3V.

Here is an example of a CF->IDE adapter that has a voltage regulator. The voltage regulator is circled.

As for the Win98 problems, how big is your SD? Is it larger than 132GB?

The scandisk errors suggest that the drive is using LBA-48 and Win98 only supported LBA-28 out of the box.

There was a win9x LBA-48 patch developed in 2006 that is floating around.

https://msfn.org/board/topic/78592-enable48bi … -137gb-barrier/

douglar wrote on 2023-03-08, 14:39:

I am not surprised that your SD->SD adapter-> Cf bridge->Cf to ide stack had issues. […]
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I am not surprised that your SD->SD adapter-> Cf bridge->Cf to ide stack had issues.

The CF->IDE adapter that you show does not look like it has a voltage regulator on it. It can only provide 5V power.

My experience has been that Type 1 SD->CF bridges require a CF->IDE adapter that can provide 3.3V.

Here is an example of a CF->IDE adapter that has a voltage regulator. The voltage regulator is circled.

61FLaf0RqRL._AC_SX679_.jpg

As for the Win98 problems, how big is your SD?

The scandisk errors suggest that the drive is using LBA-48 and Win98 only supported LBA-28 out of the box.

https://msfn.org/board/topic/78592-enable48bi … -137gb-barrier/

I tried to switch back to the cf card adapter, the situation is even worse since the bios detects the drive as ata100, going down to pio mode 0 didn't help.
Unlucky the bios don't let me choose the udma mode and no matter which settings I choose in the bios I always get the error.
Apparently with sd card and windows 98 will be no joy.

The sd card is 32gb but the windows 98 partition is only 4gb (8 for xp and the rest for the data partition).

I did some further tests trying to troubleshoot the issue.
Motherboard: P4S5A-DX+
Cf card Agfa 8gb 233x it works without issues with following bios settings:

1LBA mode: on
2Blk mode: on
3Pio mode: 3 (from 4 upwards it makes it unable to boot)
432 bit mode: on

With those settings windows 98 and dos 7.10 boot both work fine.

I tried the same settings with the 8gb microsd but no luck, also decreasing pio mode down to 0 did not work too.
If I use vanilla Fdisk it shows the full dimension of the card but only allows to create a fat16 partition of 2gb, this partition works fine.
Super fdisk allows to create a fat32 partition but then the partition doesn't get detected.

I did the same test on a older pc (486) where I use a cf card (8gb) without any issue, but the very same limits with sd applies to this machine.

My solution will be to buy a 32gb cf card which should work fine, hopefully I will able to install on the same machine windows98, winxp and a data partition.

My biggest problem with CF is the damn things avoid me... no luck getting hold of any, I see them at $$$, most I come across in local area are super fast high spec pro photo ones that they want basically 80% of retail for 10 years on. Though I've got some tiny sizes like 16MB and 32MB, thinking I should at least just put a bunch of DOS benchmarks and utils on one and quake on another or something.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-03-09, 05:14:

My biggest problem with CF is the damn things avoid me... no luck getting hold of any, I see them at $$$, most I come across in local area are super fast high spec pro photo ones that they want basically 80% of retail for 10 years on. Though I've got some tiny sizes like 16MB and 32MB, thinking I should at least just put a bunch of DOS benchmarks and utils on one and quake on another or something.

They surely cost more than sd cards in general...

16gb and 8GB are relatively affordable still. They are worth having if you need primary and secondary devices on a single IDE channel which SD cards (EDIT) have issues with today. You don’t need much space for an XP OS installation, about 2GB post install, and 98 clocks in at 300mb.

On one of my recent CF builds I installed one of those dirt cheap 120GB SATA SSDs with an IDE adapter on the second IDE channel and use that for storage, pagefile and temp.

They are surely effordable, but still more expensive (with probably longer lifespan).
didn't know that SD card do not support being used with cd drive in the same channel?
Because I did used the sd card while the cable was also connected to the cd-rom, it changed nothing compared to use it in a single channel.

So, apparently there is really no joy not only with the sd card but with cf card too!
I installed the 32gb that I received on friday.
Very same issue, it can't read fat32 partitions bigger than 2gb.
At this point it sounds to me a motherboard\chipset issue or an adapter issue.

For the CDRom drive, did you set the master and slave jumpers?

What motherboard, bios, and controller are you using?