Essentially it’s the thrashing of read/writes that kill them quicker. So any OS with a page file will start to ruin a CF card before long.

I wouldn’t run a CF card for anything other than pure DOS.

Pure DOS - or otherwise use a different device for the page file on an OS that needs one.

With disabled page file, I ran 98 and ME on a daily driver laptop + 2GB RAM + 16GB Kingston consumer grade CF for couple years (before SSDs got affordable). The card still gives me UDMA100 speeds although it hasn't seen much use the past 10 years...

Ok, i use just for dos. cf becoming increasingly rare and expensive

I think most industrial CF’s made after 2010 can handle a hobbiest work load with reliability as good if not better than a 20 year old hard drive can. Most were designed to handle xp embeded level work loads for years. I’ve been hammering a hand full of cards with 100mb bench mark tests about a dozen times a month and they are doing fine. No lost in performance or reliability yet.

Still, I do enable conservative swap file usage for builds because it’s easy to give a surplus of ram on a retro system and who wants that unnecessary storage activity?

If you are using consumer grade camera cf’s, you may experience a shorter life span.

douglar wrote on 2026-01-11, 06:22:

I think most industrial CF’s made after 2010 can handle a hobbiest work load with reliability as good if not better than a 20 year old hard drive can. Most were designed to handle xp embeded level work loads for years. I’ve been hammering a hand full of cards with 100mb bench mark tests about a dozen times a month and they are doing fine. No lost in performance or reliability yet.

Still, I do enable conservative swap file usage for builds because it’s easy to give a surplus of ram on a retro system and who wants that unnecessary storage activity?

If you are using consumer grade camera cf’s, you may experience a shorter life span.

could you tell me the exact models of heavy duty industrial CFs?

I've been using DOS fron CF for a few ywaes on this:

Re: Using XT-IDE on 386 with Compact Flash larger than 512MB - My tests.

No page file, but many DOS applications use TEMP files (incl. my compiler - which I use a LOT) ... fortuateky the system has more RAM than I neeed in DOS, so I mount a RAMdrive and point %TEMP% there.

I actually do this on most of my DOS systems.. slightly faster, less hard drive activity, and most important: it "cleans" itself any time I reboot.

Question: are CF cards more reliable than sd-cards?
As I have a 32GB sd-card paired with a SD2IDE adapter I d like to know whether it can last 3 years?

Or how do you handle sd-cards with Win98SE?
Northon Ghost images every month?

eliot_new wrote on 2026-01-11, 12:04:

Question: are CF cards more reliable than sd-cards? As I have a 32GB sd-card paired with a SD2IDE adapter I d like to know wheth […]
Show full quote

Question: are CF cards more reliable than sd-cards?
As I have a 32GB sd-card paired with a SD2IDE adapter I d like to know whether it can last 3 years?

Or how do you handle sd-cards with Win98SE?
Northon Ghost images every month?

CF cards have been made since 1994 by a lot of different vendors using a lot of different parts and technologies. Here are some gross generalizations.

• Devices before 2005 I would describe as slow with limited life spans. Skip those WD silicon drives.
• Devices with firmware between 2006 and 2012 usually have a good combination of MWDMA support and UDMA < 66. Flash chips are faster and have longer life.
• Devices with firmware newer than 2014 usually have better support for the faster udma modes at the expense of MWDMA compatibility, but finding devices that have flash and flash controllers that can actually move data faster than 30MB/s is hard.

Larger devices usually have better performance than smaller devices if they use more flash chips internally, but there’s no guarantee what’s inside from a lot of vendors. New products often have a single slow 32gb flash chips, whis is disappointing.

Buying CF devices is tough becuase it seems like vendors have a grab bag of parts from numerous contracted manufacturers. You can try to buy the same device from the same vendor and get the same lable over different guts. Some of it is disreputable people selling relabeled parts. Some of it is new old stock left over from 10 years of vendors outsourcing their manufacturing to a new off shore third party every 18 months. They dont know what they are selling.

I have had the best luck & performance with the blue label memory partner CFs for mwdma and transcend industrial CFs for udma performance that approaches sata ssd devices w/ a pata bridge.

The 40pin doms are also usually higher quality. They have similar guts to a high quality CF but sold in a package that wasn’t as price sensitive so the quality usually was better, firmware was often better too.

I spent some time looking for CF devices that support multi block transfers. I finally found some innodisk devices that supported it, but the performance and compatibility was poor. I hear swissbit might support it, but I’m waiting until i’m bored enough to waste $30 on disappointment to test that some day.

If you are really looking for fast UDMA devices, getting a 16gb msata device with a jmicron bridge is hard to beat. They do well in PIO modes. They are the fastest UDMA devices. Just don’t expect MWDMA modes.

SD devices also have a wide range of quality and features. The performance and feature limitations for sd devices on retro computers almost all come from the sinitechi bridge. internally limited to 25mb/s, PIO modes are often effectively limited to PIO2, and compatibility with late 486 pci controllers is touchy, corruption with multiblock transfers, etc. The good thing is that the quirks are all the same. If a sinitechi brdge works your you, it doesn’t matter what SD or bridge you use, you got a setup that works. I have had good luck using them with intel PIIX controllers. The life spans for SD devices is much better than it was in 2010. I have not had any die on me lately that were not obvious relabled devices.

For Win98, just give the pc the max cachable ram and set conservative swapfile usage to 1 in your system ini. If you don’t, win98 over works your swap file in advance so that things are faster if it needs to swap. Your system will be faster without it if you have plenty of RAM.

To reimage win98 on a cf, sd, or msata device, I just move the device to a contemporary pc and copy files. Works fine as long as the boot sector is undamaged.

Thing NOT to do with any flash memory is "fill it".

Flash degrades slightly with each write. A technique is used (called "wear levelling") which spreads writes around, rewriting the same logical sector does not write the same physical sector. The more sectors are free, the easier/better wear-leveling.

Btw, CFs can be harder to find these days, I found a SD<->CF adapter, takes an SD and fits in a CF slot ... verified that it works, but haven't done much reliablty testing yet.

CF cards are not rare or hard to find. They are still manufactured.

Smaller sized ones are not as common, but CF as a whole is still alive and kicking.

But yeah, keep the swap file off of them or just use them for games/application only drives and you will be fine.

DaveDDS wrote on 2026-01-11, 16:23:

Thing NOT to do with any flash memory is "fill it".

Flash degrades slightly with each write. A technique is used (called "wear levelling") which spreads writes around, rewriting the same logical sector does not write the same physical sector. The more sectors are free, the easier/better wear-leveling.

Btw, CFs can be harder to find these days, I found a SD<->CF adapter, takes an SD and fits in a CF slot ... verified that it works, but haven't done much reliablty testing yet.

Your advice about not filling solid state storage to 100% is good and most Sata SSD’s made after 2010 do wear leveling and trim which help extend the life of the devices. However ….

A noticeably smaller percentage of Pata ssd’s (aka compact flash devices & 40 pin doms) do wear leveling. There are lots of different CF devices in the world. Hard for me to generalize here. Trim is even less common on Pata ssd’s. There are some CF devices that do support Trim though.

I suspect that Pata-SD bridges don’t support wear leveling. Some A2 rated SD’s support wear leveling and trim , but that support is not internal. It depends on coordination with the device they are used in. I’d be really surprised if the sinitechi devices support wear leveling since the firmware is all <= 2015 and SD wear leveling didn’t appear until later in 2015. I have not seen any Sinitechi firmware that declares support for trim.

Two notes about your SD-CF bridge:
1) it is almost certainly a sinitechi device just like the Pata-SD bridges with the same firmware & same issues
2) my experience is that the “type I” SD-CF bridges require a CF adapter that provides 3.3v power and won’t work at 5v

Anyway, That all said, it seems reasonable to me that you could run XP for 10 hours a week on any of these devices made in the last 10 years and not run into any issues for the next 10 years.

If you are running Windows 7 or newer, why are you not using a sata ssd?

AmigaOS 3.2 does not destroy CF cards. It is in fact, a very common storage solution most users adopt. AmigaOS 3.2 does not require a swap partition/file and can be perfectly ran from read-only media. This at least goes as far back as AmigaOS 1.0.

I bought a cheap chinesse CF card in 2018 and still running XP everyday, is a small futro i use as server

Never in my life lost a CF card.. and i use in every machine i have, from dos to osx

Tiido wrote on 2026-01-10, 19:52:

With disabled page file, I ran 98 and ME on a daily driver laptop + 2GB RAM + 16GB Kingston consumer grade CF for couple years (before SSDs got affordable). The card still gives me UDMA100 speeds although it hasn't seen much use the past 10 years...

Did you limit RAM to 512MB (like in system.ini or msconfig) and use a ramdrive with the rest. I've been trying various tweaks in Win98se and Me but find I always get slower performance after extended use and crashing with the page file completely disabled.
Are there some magic tweaks you remember implementing to make it stable.

RAM was limited to about 1250MB when I used 98SE, but I quickly went to ME where I didnt have to do any limiting other than use the VCACHE.VDX fix patch and limiting file cache to 128MB. If it was larger I could not run DOS programs anymore. There were a lot of other tweaks too but those were for all kinds of things. System instability without page file has never been a problem in my use cases, there was marked performance increase and no increased likelyhood of crashes in the stuff I was using. The only thing that could end up using all the RAM and actually crash was Opera at that time, and I didn't have more than few a few crashes during several years of use (I don't have tens or hundreds of tabs open 🤣), until the hardware got retired in favor of something else (HP NX6125 -> Toshiba Tecra M4, XP this time due to GPU incompatibility with 9x)

EDIT: I managed to get access to SYSTEM.INI of the machine when it ran ME, and here is its most important section :

1[386Enh]
2ebios=*ebios
3woafont=dosapp.fon
4mouse=*vmouse, msmouse.vxd
5device=*dynapage
6device=*vcd
7device=*vpd
8device=*int13
9keyboard=*vkd
10display=*vdd,*vflatd
11Paging=off
12MaxFileCache=131072
13MinFileCache=131072
14;MaxPhysPage=40000
15MinSPs=16

I was also using some service pack available, with a bunch of patches and fixes etc. and KernelEx was always used along with Revolutions Pack because it had functions to mitigate GDI leaks and allowed for much longer uptimes.

I highly recommend the CF card adapter by ”Starrech”
It cost e few dollars more but it is worth it.
Better build quality
Many cheap adapters break.

I have been using my Startech CF adapter in my 486 computers for years.
Works much better than Spinning hard drives.
The CF adapter will eliminate performance limitations of the hard drive
And allow you to get the most out of your computer.

My 386 computer has 8mb of memory
My 486 has 16mb of memory

With the CF cards I can push these computers to th limits and get the most out of them
There is a Very noticible difference
It’s just like using an SSD compared to a Spinning hard drive.

If I was NEW to Retro computers this is one of the First upgrades I would
Do to an old computer.
Its money well spent

AlessandroB wrote on 2026-01-10, 18:48:

From DOS to Windows XP, which of the systems in between destroy CFs? Or do they exploit them so poorly that they're slower than standard 7200 rpm hard drives? The XP machine has 380 MB of RAM, all the others have 64 MB.

Embedded has a write filter that effectively makes hdds read only.

Nt4e, xpe, 7e

myne wrote on 2026-01-13, 12:58:

AlessandroB wrote on 2026-01-10, 18:48:

From DOS to Windows XP, which of the systems in between destroy CFs? Or do they exploit them so poorly that they're slower than standard 7200 rpm hard drives? The XP machine has 380 MB of RAM, all the others have 64 MB.

Embedded has a write filter that effectively makes hdds read only.

Nt4e, xpe, 7e

You're right. That's the Enhanced Write Filter (EWF).
It can be used on regular Windows XP, too, but is part of Windows XP Embedded and not available separately.

Then there's another driver that makes XP see the CF card as an IBM Mirodrive or something.
It can help that XP sees the CF card as a fixed-media (non-removable, like a hard disk).
Anyway, it's been a few years.. I don't remember the details right now.