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

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 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.

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.

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'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.

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.

Older semiconductor processing equipment running Win7 embedded off a CF card was down due to card corruption. installed this IDE to CF adapter in an older PC running Clonedisk, and with a new SanDisk CF card an an image from the vendor, created a new Win7 embedded boot disk for this 9 year old piece of equipment. We're back up and running!

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.