This is a commonly asked question.

40 pin Dom's and Industrial CF's are very similar, they are both PATA SSD's and often have similar performance profiles.

How to find a good CF? My method on this is to buy a couple different cheap brands and test.

Cheap 44 pin Doms are sometimes Sata devices with an embedded SATA-Pata converter that perform much worse than expected. I'd avoid any 44pin DOM with two controller chips on the device because they likely the bridged sata devices.

Consumer CF's are often focused on photo & video streaming work loads and sometimes have ATA parameters such as "removable media" that can cause compatibility issues some PCs.

SD to PATA adapters, whether 40 pin, 44 pin, or CF form factors all seem to be Sinitechi clones with the same chipset, close firmware versions and similar performance given the same SD card. These generally work well with the oldest and newest IDE controllers, but sometimes have compatibility issues with ATA-2 through ATA-4 era controllers.

But generally speaking, in the end, a 4Mhz 8088 with an 8 bit bus is not fast enough to test the limits on any of these devices, so you should probably chose based on price, interoperability, and esthetics, not performance.

I might go with one of those SD to PATA adapters then. SD cards are cheap and easy to find. Of course I don't know about SD card compatibility with these things.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/284019856938

Does that XTIDE card support IDE/ATA or just 8-Bit IDE?
CF cards support both, as far as I know.
XTIDE as such was an old version of IDE that lived for a very short time.
A few XT mainboards had a connector for it, I think.
Those Commodore PCs with 8088 had them, I vaguely remember. Or were it Atari PCs?

Using one of "those SD to PATA adapters" without any issues in combination with XT-IDE.
For an extra performance boot, don't forget to activate BIOS shadowing of the used ROM address, when e.g. using XT-IDE on a nic, see https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HEDehjy09fg

1541 wrote on 2022-05-27, 14:44:

Using one of "those SD to PATA adapters" without any issues in combination with XT-IDE.
For an extra performance boot, don't forget to activate BIOS shadowing of the used ROM address, when e.g. using XT-IDE on a nic, see https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HEDehjy09fg

What SD card are you using? Will a cheap Verbatim blue work (https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-Premium-Memor … s/dp/B000WJ725U)

Also how is the power draw on these? I assume it's less than a old fashioned HDD.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-05-27, 14:32:

Does that XTIDE card support IDE/ATA or just 8-Bit IDE?

It's the commonly known IDE for common HDDs. The name comes from "adding IDE to XTs" and not the 8bit protocol.

@Tempest Probably, I have several SD-Cards/adapters in use, ranging from no name 2 GB cards to branded 32 GB ones...

The power consumption is negligible...

konc wrote on 2022-05-27, 15:08:

Jo22 wrote on 2022-05-27, 14:32:

Does that XTIDE card support IDE/ATA or just 8-Bit IDE?

It's the commonly known IDE for common HDDs. The name comes from "adding IDE to XTs" and not the 8bit protocol.

Ah, ok. I was worried that the physical XTIDE card was implementing exactly that 8-Bit variation only (since it's sufficient for CF cards):
https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2014/04/ … -interface.html

Since the origional poster has a PC5150,and mentions an XTIDE v2 card, this almost has to be 8bit ide, no? Or does the XTIde card manage to talk 16 bit to the hard drive and 8bitto the computer?

douglar wrote on 2022-05-29, 03:03:

Since the origional poster has a PC5150,and mentions an XTIDE v2 card, this almost has to be 8bit ide, no? Or does the XTIde card manage to talk 16 bit to the hard drive and 8bitto the computer?

The modern XT-IDE buffers 16 bit transfers from the hard drive and puts them onto the 8 bit bus. The XT-IDE BIOS also solves geometry issues, so it works with pretty much all IDE hard drives.

^A pair of shift registers w/ switch for flow control ?