The CF cards I am using in my 386 and 486 systems are not even the fastest types available (but not the slowest either) and they are way better than any standard hard drive I have attempted to use on those systems. I can't ever imagine going back to a regular hard drive.

bluejeans wrote:

IAm I being spoiled by the speed of flash media?

Flash media has fast "reactions" (low access time or response time). They have no mechanical parts and do perform an operation almost immediately.

bluejeans wrote:

It seemed so slow.

Sometimes HDDs are faster, though. SD cards are not used to handle lots of writes one-by-one. In some circumstances, they behave "jerky" because of this.
I experienced this a few times with Windows 9x when I used a flash medium as a main drive.

Another things is alignment. For over 30 years, both Operating Systems (-a few oddball versions of DOS aside-) and HDDs used 512byte/per sector.
If the alignment is not matching, a socalled "read-modify write" is executed. This will cause a performance drop of about 50%.

Windows XP is/was famous for this. By default, the XP setup begins at sector 63 which doesn't align well to the 4KiB boundary (modern flash uses 4K pages internally).

That's why it is so important to check alignment (GParted can do that. Recent versions do have limited FAT support, though).
CF cards and DOMs traditionally used 512bytes/per sector, while SD cards are more like SSDs (4K).

Edit: There are also hybrid drives, socalled SSHDs. The Momentus XT is a famous model. Phil made a video about it, I believe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7OAE1FaGKo

A 3 GB IDE HDD is indeed quite slow and I agree that a SD card will feel much more responsive.

The lack of a cache has to show somewhere. At the top end of the market, 160+ MB/s rated cards, I do think flash cards finally beat PATA drives at everything.

When it comes to the 800mb hard drive I replaced with a 512mb cf flash card , yes , the flash card is soooooo much faster.

Because in general latency - that is access and seek time - is so much more important to subjective speed than peak linear transfer rate, CF cards will almost always feel faster than magnetic disk. This is why an SSD feels so much faster, even when peak transfer rates are similar, for example.