There is only one commonly available SD to IDE chip used in pretty much every adapter on the market, the FC1307A. There used to be more options, but good luck one finding one these day .

My personal experience with these is that they mostly all work the same way and are generally reliable, except for one issue [1], which is more of an initial setup one rather than a reliability concern.

I always source my SD cards from reliable sources (as much as is possible) to avoid flaky counterfeits and prefer high endurance type cards Here's an idea: using high endurance (micro)SD cards meant for continuous video recording as storage for retro gear . . Getting cards with the fastest sequential read and write speeds is pointless with FC1307A based adapters anyway as the chip tops off below aven ATA33 speeds and faster cards might actually introduce compatibility concerns due to their support of newer SD protocols . Cards optimized for random writes and reads might be worth it, though, but again that's more of a performance concern than a reliability one .

The FC1307A being at the heart of pretty much all available SD to IDE and SD to CF adapters and having been so for at least 5 years, it is unlikely that much has changed on the adapter front . I have personally dumped the firmware from a random unbranded one of these and it exactly matched this one https://goughlui.com/2019/02/03/tested-generi … dapter-sd35vc0/ . If there are other firmware variants in the wild, I have not heard of them .

[1]
I have experienced one significant issue with these adapters Re: Using a vintage multi-track recorder as a mixer, namely the Roland VS-880EX - might apply to other Roland VS- units , but working around it for PC use using appropriate partitioning software should not be an issue .

I've been using CF cards exclusively in my AT and XT-based systems, and have no reliability or stability issues with the cards themselves. I've been primarily using standard SanDisk cards, plus a couple Verbatim and Cisco Industrial branded cards. This includes cards ranging from 32MB and to 4GB.

The one time I thought I was having issues with CF cards turned out to be a faulty IDE cable.

I’ve been getting SanDisk Extreme and Extreme Plus for my SD cards thinking I needed the overhead, glad to get clarification on ATA speed. I’ll replace them with the High Endurance line. When I do buy them off Amazon, I always make sure they ship direct from their store and not a third-party. Is that a reliable way of going about things?

Regarding CF: I’d like to buy a couple more adapters and see how they fare with my systems by compare. What would be good cards to get for the rigs in my sigs? I was gonna get a SanDisk Extreme Pro (up to 160MB/s), but now realizing this is likely overkill

I stick to older CF cards I find every now and then on old Digital Cameras on the local flea markets. I think I have a lifetime supply of them at this point.
They're fast enough to make even a pretty fast HDD from the era look snail-slow and reliable enough to this day only one failed on me.
I just make an image of a fresh installation of the OS I want as a blank point for when some driver/program messes things up.

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

When I first built my Win98/DOS PC back in 2021 I tried the CF route, but I went through two Transcend CF cards that were constantly locking up my system. I'm honestly not sure if it was the cards or the adapter (but the adapter should basically just be an IDE pass-through I guess so who knows), but I moved on to an SD adapter and its been rock solid ever since.

teiresias wrote on 2023-01-24, 23:21:

When I first built my Win98/DOS PC back in 2021 I tried the CF route, but I went through two Transcend CF cards that were constantly locking up my system. I'm honestly not sure if it was the cards or the adapter (but the adapter should basically just be an IDE pass-through I guess so who knows), but I moved on to an SD adapter and its been rock solid ever since.

Depends on the adapter and how cheaply it was made, I have a bunch of the cheap ones out of China and they never last that long compared to the more expensive Startech ones. My rule with the cheap China ones is I throw them under a scope before I use them and just check over the solder joints and touch up any shit ones.

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?

I found second hand Sandisk, 30mb/s CF cards on ebay a few years ago. They probably saw heavy use as industrial cards, but as said have been flawless. That being said, strictly MSDOS only, no Win98. I only use SSD or HDD for Win98. I have issues with sdcards, but it was probably adapter issues. Cf cards mean no adapter, they are built on top of IDE. The cards I have are similar to ebay item 143629337340 (no affiliation).

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-25, 02:08:

teiresias wrote on 2023-01-24, 23:21:

When I first built my Win98/DOS PC back in 2021 I tried the CF route, but I went through two Transcend CF cards that were constantly locking up my system. I'm honestly not sure if it was the cards or the adapter (but the adapter should basically just be an IDE pass-through I guess so who knows), but I moved on to an SD adapter and its been rock solid ever since.

Depends on the adapter and how cheaply it was made, I have a bunch of the cheap ones out of China and they never last that long compared to the more expensive Startech ones. My rule with the cheap China ones is I throw them under a scope before I use them and just check over the solder joints and touch up any shit ones.

It was a Startech adapter, so I primarily think it was the Transcend cards (they were 133x new from Amazon).

teiresias wrote on 2023-01-25, 03:57:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-25, 02:08:

teiresias wrote on 2023-01-24, 23:21:

When I first built my Win98/DOS PC back in 2021 I tried the CF route, but I went through two Transcend CF cards that were constantly locking up my system. I'm honestly not sure if it was the cards or the adapter (but the adapter should basically just be an IDE pass-through I guess so who knows), but I moved on to an SD adapter and its been rock solid ever since.

Depends on the adapter and how cheaply it was made, I have a bunch of the cheap ones out of China and they never last that long compared to the more expensive Startech ones. My rule with the cheap China ones is I throw them under a scope before I use them and just check over the solder joints and touch up any shit ones.

It was a Startech adapter, so I primarily think it was the Transcend cards (they were 133x new from Amazon).

I haven't had a great experience ordering CF cards from Amazon, ones they list as being genuine may not be as genuine as they describe, especially since we know their stock keeping isn't exactly great and counterfeit products are stored with real ones.

Its a real pain having to test each card I get from there to make sure its an actual genuine CF card.

In would like to piggyback off what @kolderman said. I use cf and sd only for dos based systems. If it's running Windows 98 or above I use SSDs. Something easily overlooked in my opinion. You can easily find sub $10 USD SSDs now days. It's just to simply, reliable, convenient, and affordable.

Consider disk-on-modules (DOMs) also, as they were made to operate as a hard disk.

Sometimes these Sinitechi clones have different firmware. It would be interesting to see if the SD-IDE devices that acted differently had different firmware.

If you use a diagnostic tool that can generate an ATA report, you can see a lot of info. I usually do the text report from speedsys, but HWinfo and many other diagnostic tools can see the info

Here is what I see for two of mine when connected to an ATA-6 Nforce2 IDE controller:

1IDE1 Master <ATA-7>  SINTECHI HighSpeed SD to CF Adapter V1.0
2     *     Firmware Revision             : Rev 1.2
3     *     Maximum Transfer Mode         : PIO 4, DMA 2, UDMA 5 (ATA-100)
4     *     Selected DMA Transfer Mode    : UDMA 5
5     *     Cache Buffer Size             : 8 KB 

1IDE1 Master <ATA-7>  FC-1307 SD to CF Adapter V1.3
2      *     Firmware Revision             : Rev 1.3
3      *     Maximum Transfer Mode         : PIO 4, DMA 2, UDMA 5 (ATA-100)
4      *     Selected DMA Transfer Mode    : UDMA 5
5      *     Cache Buffer Size             : 8 KB 

I have trouble getting these devices to work with computers with ATA-2 controllers (PIO4, DMA2), but they have worked fine with newer (>= ATA-3) & older controllers ( <=ATA-1). Could have just been the BIOS though.

Never have been able to get SD working on my one ATA-2 board as well, that’s what I’ve been using my one CF card adapter on.

So I’m seeing suggestions of using an SSD. I’m aware of dosdude1 doing some soldering work to make a custom NAND SSD that uses IDE, but aside from that, are there any good, reliable SSDs with IDE? I tried using a couple SATA to IDE adapters around 2010 when my first HDD failed, and none of them worked with any 430VX, 440BX, or Apollo133 boards that I had at the time. Have things changed?

We have a thread on the different types of pata-sata bridges here: Re: SATA2PATA adapters experience

TLDR: pata-sata adapters generally work reliably without a large performance hit

douglar wrote on 2023-01-25, 14:10:

We have a thread on the different types of pata-sata bridges here: Re: SATA2PATA adapters experience

TLDR: pata-sata adapters generally work reliably without a large performance hit

I have quite a stockpile of SATA HDDs, so this’ll be something good for me to try out as well, thanks!

I'm considering an alternative idea...
Would it be crazy to use a SanDisk MAX ENDURANCE 32gb and a proper adapter (advices are welcome, best would be one with bracket the same which exist for CF card) that I would use with my p4 build that I use to test video cards (agp universal) with windows xp (and maybe windows 98)?
I had quite enough of ide hard drives that die from a day to another (lucky I did a backup of the stuff tested since 2019 or I would have lost it from night to day).

Nemo1985 wrote on 2023-01-27, 01:46:

I'm considering an alternative idea...
Would it be crazy to use a SanDisk MAX ENDURANCE 32gb and a proper adapter (advices are welcome, best would be one with bracket the same which exist for CF card) that I would use with my p4 build that I use to test video cards (agp universal) with windows xp (and maybe windows 98)?
I had quite enough of ide hard drives that die from a day to another (lucky I did a backup of the stuff tested since 2019 or I would have lost it from night to day).

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 .