Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-01-23, 19:37:Personally, I think CF cards make sense if you: […]
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Personally, I think CF cards make sense if you:
a) are using DOS or early Win95 class hardware
b) want the ability to switch between multiple operating systems quickly and easily
c) prefer a quiet machine
At the same time, I do understand people who are nostalgic for the crunchy read/write sound of a real HDD. That stuff never bothered me, but I always disliked the high-pitched noise produced by spinning platters. This gets especially annoying if you are using several HDDs with 7500 RPM or higher. For that reason, I will happily use modern SSDs on anything more powerful than a Pentium MMX.
Well, any reason is a good reason to use or not use a CF card. It's great that we have options and nothing stops you from using both simultaneously. It's a personal thing. These old computers don't really serve much purpose other than 3 points: invoking feel, understanding computer history and giving hardware nerds something to nerd out about. 95% of the people on here just play games or benchmark anyway.. catastrophic failure is really not the end of the world and I believe hard drive failure rates are overstated, at least from my personal experience with hard drives that are kept in a normal environment.
What annoys me is that the second you mention mechanical hard drives anywhere today you'll immediately get a CF card slapped in your face as a response. It doesn't even matter how much you say that you specifically want to use a mechanical hard drive.
Now I absolutely don't mind that people tend not to like hard drives, keeps prices low for me who do want to use them 😉
keenerb wrote on 2024-01-23, 19:15:
I switched to IDE disk-on-modules for all my machines. Is that more or less annoying? 😁
Never even heard of this lols, that's cool. How have your experiences been with them?
maxtherabbit wrote on 2024-01-23, 19:15:
Yeah I'm tired of hearing about them too, especially in the context of asking for help configuring them (geometry, partitioning, etc.)
People run into a ton of setup issues they wouldn't have using period appropriate storage
I do think CF cards have a better reputation than they deserve, even if they are useful, cheap and usually work. They can still present problems not found in original hardware, and they are by no means guaranteed to be reliable. CF cards don't have unlimited writes and were not designed to host operating systems.