Has anyone ever gotten one of the dual-CF to 2.5" IDE adapters to work in a laptop? \ VOGONS

Has anyone ever gotten one of the dual-CF to 2.5" IDE adapters to work in a laptop?

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First post, by Kahenraz

Posted on 2022-10-29, 21:35

Kahenraz Offline

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There is product that adapts two CF cards into a single 2.5" drive for use as master/slave. I buy these for use in laptops when a PCB-style adapter won't work, due to an incompatible insertion location or mounting bracket. I have tried several times to use both slots in various laptops when I have the opportunity, to see if I can get a second disk to appear, but it never works. I have even seen the drive recognized in a the BIOS as a slave device, but nothing would appear after booting into Windows. My guess is that there is some kind of resource monopolization that is dedicated to an expansion bay, and this overrides any other device that might appear via cable select. However, I have also seen it fail even on laptops that have no expansion bay.

Out of curiosity, has anyone ever managed to get one of these to work in a laptop?

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Reply 1 of 3, by Horun

Posted on 2022-10-30, 05:48

Horun Offline

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Never played with one but would assume it BIOS and controller specific for using two CF even if the limited barely technical manual from Syba manual does not mention it... just my opinion on cheap chinese stuff

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Reply 2 of 3, by Sphere478

Posted on 2022-10-30, 06:23

Sphere478 Offline

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I have never had much luck with ide to cf adapters.

I have had luck with 44 pin ssds that use msata or m.2 sata sticks internally.

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Reply 3 of 3, by Kahenraz

Posted on 2022-10-30, 06:38

Kahenraz Offline

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I strongly prefer to use CompactFlash cards with IDE controllers, over other adapters which use SD or mSATA. CompactFlash is a superset of ATA and is always a straight passthrough, with no additional logic or interface to cause any problems.

For example, I was unable to get a 16GB mSATA to work properly with one of my motherboards this past week with an adapter. I could get it to detect, but it would not boot FAT32; even though it could boot FAT. This motherboard is a 440BX, so it's pretty old, and I don't have a 16GB CF card to compare (I have on coming in the mail), so the problem might exist with the capacity. I won't know for sure if it's the adapter until I can test with a CF card.

At least when using a CompactFlash card, there is never this kind of mystery. It either works or it doesn't. There are some minor caveats when using some cards though, such as the removable media bit causing problems, and some DMA issues with certain cards.

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