StarTech.com 40/44 Pin IDE to Compact Flash SSD Adapter - IDE to CF Card reader - CF to IDE Converter (IDE2CF),Black

This adapter has worked wonders in converting my old 386 and 486 computers over to solid state drives. a 4 gig CF card can be formated with maxblast software ddo so that the whole 4 gigs can be recognized. Much better solution than trying to find a 4 gig ide hard drive. I bought several of these to upgrade my old machines with. The down side is that with SOME of the machines the master / slave isn't recognized properly. Sometimes you have to put the ide2cf on a different ide cable from the hard drive or cd-rom. But then you have to remember that machines of this vintage had personalities and even identical hardware would not perform exactly the same. All in all I'm very happy with it. It's allowed me to convert my old machines over to newer technology and keep them going. I highly recommend the ide2cf. One of the advantages this card has over other types is that it does plug into the ribbon cable so that you CAN have two devices on the same cable. That works most of the time. Only 1 out of 5 machines needed to have the ide2cf placed on a different cable from the cd-rom. I have gotten decent speed results with the sandisk 4gb 30mb/s cards. I'm very happy with this product and would recommend it to anyone. One down side is the back of the card has exposed circuitry. I used silicon to glue a small piece of wood to the back, then glued the wood to the top of the floppy drive. This lets me change cf cards without opening the case. works great.

I bought this to replace a hard drive in a PowerMac G4 with a sawtooth motherboard. The machine has been running about 1 week and no issues. The install was easy and so far the software had no issues recognizing the drive. I’m using a Sandisk Extreme CF card and it is fast. I don’t have benchmarking software but booting and launching programs is 2-3x faster than using the hard drive. I took one star from the value because the back of the board is completely exposed. The hard drive tray for the Mac is all metal. I wish a plastic shield would have been stuck to the bottom of this board to provide extra protection from potential shorts. I have not had any issues but if this was not mounted and just laid inside a computer case I believe there is potential for the adapter to short out. I would buy this again in the future.

We bought this as a simple means to format CF Cards as IDE replacements for old DOS based testing equipment. We used a more expensive StarTech adapter for the front facing bays, but didn't need one for the infrequent setups/formats. This was perfectly suited for an old system using IDE/PATA, SATA, SCSCI and duplicating very old but very necessary system drives.

I needed to replace an old CF-to-IDE adapter. I have a really fast rugged CF card holding my OS on it. Everything like /tmp /log etc. is in RAM anyway, so it basically holds an embedded OS. This one keeps up with booting quickly, doesn't flake out, and I like the indicator lights. But what sysadmin doesn't like blinking lights? Difficult to hardware mount it though. I took some of the packaging material, cut it to fit on the underside, and mounted it inside the server it boots where the original HD was. My server has a major SATA raid setup but all I needed was something to boot it instead of a USB stick. It's awesome. Plugging it in and getting it to work with the case open was a snap. Getting it firmly to actually physically mount it was a brief challenge, not for a beginner. Getting it to mount the OS was a snap, no problems, totally transparent to the BIOS.

This was the ONLY IDE-to-whatever device that I could find that worked with my Mac Performa 630CD. In fact, it was kind of a struggle to get it to work - not because of this device, but because I could only find 2 compact flash cards that would work with the Performa. The "Verbatim 4GB CompactFlash Memory Card, 95188 Black" (found here on Amazon) was the only brand new card I could find that worked. I also had a very old 32MB CF card that worked, but 32MB isn't much room. 4GB is much better, and conveniently the partition size limit for the OS on my Performa. I left all three jumpers at their default setting of 1-2 (not 2-3), and plugged in the CF card, connected it to the Performa and it worked. System 7 could see it just fine, as well as System 8. I wish I could find a larger size card that would work with the Performa, but I'm just happy its working.

I've seen some reviews here and elsewhere report that their adapters have caught fire and the solder bridge on pins 41/42 was to blame. I don't think that's the case. I looked up the IDE spec and both of those pins are for +5V, one for the logic board and the other for a HDD motor (obviously not relevant here). It looks like Startech made the solder bridge intentionally to carry the 5V throughout the rest of the circuit board. I traced it out and don't see any reason why it would cause a short. I can't explain why some people have had fire issues with theirs, maybe the pins on the underside shorted on something metal while testing? Given the design of the unit it would be pretty easy, especially since there's really no means for mounting this in a case. But so far the adapter has been working great for me.

Worked great with my 486, replacing a broken IDE drive. However, it doesn't have any mounting solution and attaches via a cable (not directly to the IDE connection on the board), so it flops around until you find a way to mount it yourself. A couple tips, be sure to buy an "industrial" CF card, since that's required for a vintage computer to see it as a fixed disk. And if you can't boot off of your CF card even after installing an OS, use MS-DOS to run "fdisk /mbr", which will write a master boot record on the card, and you'll be good to go.

El producto es bueno y llego rapido, me urgia. buen servicio

Der eine Stern Abzug eben wegen dem Nichtfunktionieren am Alesis. Dieses hat eine IDE-Schnittstelle, die mit den meisten alten 3.5 Zoll Festplatten kompatibel ist. Da steht "UDMA 66/100" gelabelt, und das war zu der Zeit (2002) Standard. Natürlich ist das HD-24 nicht 1000%iger PC-Standard. Dennoch sollte eine IDE-Platte aus der Zeit vom Interface simuliert werden. Auf meinem PC von damals funktioniert der Konverter problemlos, zumindest als zweite Primärplatte hab ich das mit einer 64er CF Karte von Sandisk, die ich extra dafür gekauft habe, getestet.

Ne ho usata una per sostituire in un registratore digitale a 8 tracce il sistema di store che era un vecchio zip. Ora posso memorizzare le registrazioni su Compact Flash, con un grandissimo guadagno in termini di tempo di registrazione.

I bought this so I could replace the IDE hard drive in my Power Macintosh 6500. I didn't have high hopes at first as this was the third product I'd bought to try and enable me to use a Compact Flash card with my 6500. Well, this was the goldilocks one all right - it worked straight away; my Mac was able to recognise it and format (initialize) it via the OS 8.6 startup CD. Now my Mac is devoid of a spinning hard drive I can breathe a sight of relief! Excellent, excellent product and a great price too for what it does.

StarTech stuff is amazing, wouldn’t go with anyone else for parts like this. They’re expensive but worth it. There are a lot of cheap CF to IDE adapters out there but this one is almost guaranteed to work because it’s StarTech. Comes with a lot of options other adapters don’t, like whether your CF card is 5V or 3.3V. Two other jumpers, Master/Slave, and finally one for 40 pin or 44 pin (desktop or laptop IDE). There are solder pads to add an extra LED if you want more detailed information on what’s going on (whether it’s in Master or Slave, etc) but by default there’s a drive activity LED. Works great with my Power Mac G4. Only drawback is it requires a floppy power connector instead of Molex (LP4). Non beige Power Macs don’t have those so I needed to buy a separate adapter.