Ximimark 2Pcs Compact Flash CF Card to 3.5 Female 40 Pin IDE Hard Drive Bootable Adapter Converter Module

A basic but still pretty cool product, this allows you to replace an IDE hard drive with a Compact Flash (CF) card, which essentially gives you an SSD, but given the speed limitations of IDE. I purchased a pair of these to use in retro computers (16/32 bit systems) to replacing aging IDE hard drives.They work great, they're fast, quiet, and cool running. If you're looking at this product already, you probably already know you want this. But...Before you buy this version, take note, this has a FEMALE connector, which means, you'll be plugging it in to a MALE connector to use it. You'll find male connectors on your motherboards or expansion cards. If you're using this internally on a retro system it might not fit sticking straight out of the male socket like this. You'll probably want to put it on the end of a cable and mount it somewhere else (liker a drive bay) - this is where you'll run in to a problem. An IDE cable has FEMALE connectors on both ends, so you'll plug in to your MALE motherboard socket and then you'll have a female adapter and a female cable that won't connect together. If you intend to mount your IDE to CF adapter away from your motherboard then you'll need the version with the male pinned connector. I use both in different systems.

I've read the bad reviews. I have bought several of these. For $8 - you can't be hurt, out of 10 - one was bad. I used these in older PCs to replace the old mechanical spindle disks. Generally Pentium or newer. I have used them in some older PCs as well, but you generally have to manually figure out the parameters. Whereas in Pentium and newer PCs - the auto-discovery has had no problems seeing them. I use an old copy of EZDrive to duplicate the disks, but other programs work fine as well. And, these work fine with just plain DOS - fdisk, format, etc. Very pleased. And with the removable Compact Flash(CF) card - you can do some neat things.

Ordered two adapters and both were dead and didn't work. Would not recommend.

Put it in a Pentium MMX machine and it worked though It was hard to tell if it was backwards or forwards before powering the computer on

Unit works but the LED's Were Installed backwards. Soldering was poor and had a few solder bridges. Quick work to solve but should not have to.

I used this to successfully replace the hard drive in a BR1600CD recorder with a 128GB microSD card which I installed into a DIGIGEAR SLIM CF ADAPTER (also bought on Amazon).The connector on this device is female, so you will need a male to female IDE cable to connect it to the recorder, and you'll need a power cord that has a floppy drive power connector. I tried another device to do this without success, but this one work. Keep in mind the br1600 will format the SD card into two 80GB partitions, leaving the extra space on the card unused semicolons that's just the design of the BR1600. but this does work for this in case anyone else was wondering about trying it out. I fit the completed assembly into a static bag oh, and just mounted it in the hard drive space.

Wanted a small (16-20GB) HDD for a Windows 95 machine I've been working on. As it's difficult to find HDDs of that size anymore, I decided going with a CF card and adapter would be a better option.My motherboard (an Atrend ATC-5040) picked up the adapter no problems, and installation was smooth sailing. Haven't done any speed testing with the card or adapter, but I can say that it's faster than a regular HDD, especially one of a more period correct nature.I did have to use an external power connector myself, while some reviews claim the motherboard itself can provide power. It could be that I need to switch it from 5v to 3.3v, but be aware that it may just need power if it isn't working at first.

I popped this into my NuXT v2.0 and it worked flawlessly. The card can be set as master or slave and providing +5v via the motherboard rather than an external connector works. It's a tidy solution.Now I'm rocking two CF cards, a 64MB boot drive and a 4GB drive split into two partitions for storing everything else.My prior solution was one of those bracket-mounted CF adapters. That one would only work as master and required two external cable connections, one for data and one for power. Just getting a good IDE cable long enough to route neatly was proving infeasible.The fact that they send you TWO of these babies for next to nothing is pretty incredible, too.