It's been 6 months about. The computer with this in it has been running 24/7 for 6 months! Still working great! Yes it reads from the CF card constantly and super fast no issues. I'm pretty sure this device will outlive the CF card.

First off, I ordered both the Syba and Startech version of the same product. To my surprise they are exactly the same. See in the photo. My guess is they're made by the same manufacturer and the only differentiator is the company's sticker on the back.As such, both work equally -- DMA mode cannot be enabled in Windows 98 SE, however, UDMA mode works by default in Windows 2000. My guess is W98 is just more picky with regards to mainboard drivers for the IDE BUS. No hassles otherwise. Works as advertised.

used a few of these on old msdos machines with 2g ino disk cards, work well

Utilizado para usar CF como disco duro en máquinas antiguas. Si se desea se puede quitar el braquet metalico y colocarlo dentro del gabinete.

I've purchased about a dozen StarTech CF-IDE adapters for various retro computers but I decided to try the Syba since it was half the cost and I didn't need a drive bay.I'm happy to say it works perfectly in my 20 year-old retro computer (an old AMD computer from 1997). I'm using this card with a SanDisk 16 GB CF and, unlike some of the super-cheap cards, this DOES send the HDD activity indicator to the motherboard so the LED does work properly. The overall build quality seems good and the CF card rails are deep enough so I don't feel like I'm going to bend the pins. Inserting and removing the card is smooth. The slot opening does come rather close to the edge of my case's back bracket but I didn't run into any clearance issues with my particular PC case.

Arrivato in tempo .Funziona in modo perfete per colegare una memoria compact flash in canale ide , per aumentare memoria o come un hard disk agiuntivo.

This adapter would find its consumers among those who prefer "noiseless over performance" devices, who builds servers, or need some extra controllers for NAS. I tried several adapters before I bought this one. The previous ones failed to boot from CF cards larger than 512 MB and demonstrated quite poor read/write performance. In some cases it could be OK since there are OSes for servers which require just 200 MB or so and could be loaded directly into memory. However in most cases there is a need for CF cards over 2 GB and this is the case where Syba SD-CF-IDE-A IDE to Compact Flash Adapter comes to play. It supports variety of large cards. Works nicely with SanDisk Ultra 4 GB (30 MB/s) on my little server and never failed so far. Read/write performance is acceptable. Could be even better with faster cards (but it costs much more bucks!). Summing up, it a a very nice inexpensive device.

Was not clearly shown that this adapter is a female CF-to-IDE which means it needs to kill one of your IDE ports to work.Why would someone build a CF-to-IDE adapter knowing that it would be a replacement for a HD but not give it the ability to PLUG-IN in place of the outgoing IDE?!?!?Did work as advertised though, but still kept it at one star because it will forever sit on my shelf.

It's my own fault probably. I want to use a CF card (1) as a speed up for Windows Vista.By using a CF card as a HDD it should work identically to the current style, but expensive,SSD (solid state disks). After all, a CF , SD, or any memory (2) is just like SSD (3).But I goofed when it came to the sex of the connector. It says, "direct insert" andI failed. That means I, and you if you buy this, will have to insert this adapterdirectly into the IDE header on the motherboard.It's possible I can get a male to male 40 pin or 44 pin adapter to make this fit anIDE cable. I have an IDE device in my CD Rom so why would I screw myself and limitone header to this one device? Because I was poor in my assessment of what I wantedand what I had.My motherboard, and many current mobos may not have an IDE header at all. If you dohave an IDE header you may have one instead of two. One header can support 2 devices.Normally a CD ROM is an IDE device (I think). so if you have 1 IDE header and wantyour CD ROM to work then you need to get the opposite sex adapter.The opposite sex adapter will have male pins on the IDE connector so that it can pluginto the IDE cable.There is another consideration which just came to me. When using IDE devices on 1 cablethe slowest device is the limiting device to the overall read and write speed.NOTICE: I'm wrong. On Wikipedia it says that the speeds are not limited by the slowestdevice. See IDE SPEEDS there and see the section:Two devices on one cable - speed impactThe only impact, of speed, may be if both devices are in operation at the same time.That's not very likely for me.Wikipedia has a 'Compact Flash Interface' section. Look at their photo of the device sexmade to plug into a cable and see how this device, that I bought here, is the oppositesex. IF you want to plug this into a cable (I'd figure that's the easy way plus youget 2 devices on 1 cable) you'll want to use the type shown in the wikipedia article.When shopping, here, you'll want to look for MALE connection pins and avoid FEMALE or'Direct connection' if you want to use an IDE cable with 2 devices.. this and anotherlike a CD ROM.When I get mine going I'll try to post the results of speed and so on.It should speed up read operations because the random access should be very fast.Loading small files, like opening text files (for notes) should be much faster thangoing to the HDD. I'll try to report it here:Good luck. Don't forget to check out what you REALLY want to connect this to insideyour computer before buying it.(1) If you use Solid state memory you should see faster start up times for small files.SSD (solid state memory devices) are about $1.00 / GB but this is the same thing if youpop in a CF card. Why not try it on the cheap ?(2) SD, CF, and SSD all work the same way. They store data without the need for refreshingthe data (like dynamic memory). So once it's stored (using power) the power can be removedand the data stays for 100 years. SSDs DO have some 'wear leveling' but that's not aserious problem if you're just trying this out to see how it works for you.(3)In SSD - Wear leveling is for ppl who are storing, rewriting and erasing lots of gb ofdata all day all of the time. In a year or two or 1,000,000 cycles some bits stop savingproperly so wear leveling circuites spread the risk over more bits .FOr this device just defrag it or reformat and it's the same effect. You're hidingbad bits and using the good ones. If any bit doesn't work you'll get a write errorbut I think Vista has built in write error checking and fixing.This setup is really for 2 kinds of ppl.a. The person who's wanting to speed up computer by adding 'lots' of memory where fastaccess times will speed up small files opening. Caching of pages might be speeded up too.You'll have to decide what goes on to this 'drive' if you're speeding up your computerb. The other use is when someone wants to boot up from the CF card. while XP mightboot faster it could boot slower too. Unless your memory card is very fast a HDD willstream large files (10mb, 20mb) fasteer than a slow CF card. But a CF card might haveaccess times of 0.1 ms while a HDD is 12 ms or 120x slower. Thus a 10kb .ini filefor your browser will be loaded in less than 1ms and the HDD won't have even found itby then. But a 10mb load of the browser, itself, might run at 133mb/ sec after theHDD found it. The memory card might stream it (to the cpu) at 1/10 that speed.so some files, the smaller ones, will be the ones that 'run' faster from CF cards.It's a bit like having data in memory when reading from a CF card.. that is until youget up to where you want more than, about 100kb. then the data rate looks slow comparedto a HDD.If you're serious about using a CF card, or SSD to speed up your computer thenseriously read up on which files should be on the CF or SSD memory.Lastly let me poke MSoft. They don't know how to program and the proof is in theway their files are organized. In DOS days a programmer had very little memoryto work with , 640kb (or less). So programs HAD to run within that amount. Becauseof those constraints one way to accomodate that space was to talk to the CPU directly.Today MSoft talks to the CPU through several layers of interpreters each of which slowdown the process of doing things. When you add the fact that besides doing what you wantMsoft is trying toa. get cookie information sent to their subscriber base (the companies who pay for yourinformationb. MSoft is also offering back doors so windows and 'offers' can pop up if a cookie hitson something you looked atc. MSoft doesn't program to the CPU because it's hard to do, requires high levels ofcommitment and intelligence and the financial returns are lower ..in contrast pick a program like ACDSEE / uTorrent / Opera Browser /while they don't necessarily use 'direct to cpu' (a1) programming they aren't focusedon selling you something thus their software is streamlined, works smoother and betterand faster.(a1) writing to the CPU is called 'assembly language' Find any program written in assemblylanguage. Cell phones use programming similar to assembly language. Look how fast andefficient computational devices they are. If you take the time to study the history ofassembly programming from about 1982 when the 8080 CPU came out you'll be super surprisedhow easy it is to learn and how much you can do with it.One use of this CF card is to load an entire operating system into the 2, 4, or 8 gband load it from the card. The advantage is .. suppose you had your own version ofWindows or Linux. IF you plug in your CF card into a memory slot (they use USB connections)or into the IDE (like this device works) you can set the bios to load from the CF cardwhatever version, settings, or setup of Windows or Linux that you, personally have devised.It's a great way to take your personal setup with you where ever you go. The limitationsare that the computer, you boot up, must be able to boot from 1. the memory card slot or2.a disk drive (but remember you have to be able to get TO the drive inside the case soas to plug in this card with the CF memory)Last note: If you like the ideas above watch Google and what they do. They're richand sharp enough to know to program in assembly language. If their OS comes outfor smart phones AND for PCs .. AND if it's programmed in assembly language you maysee the beginning of a very new interesting WORLD. Every device from your watch totiny devices like ear rings may have complete PCs in them taking data and reportingeverything from your health to .. well who knows. it's all about making the CPUrespond quickly by using assembly language, that removes the need for lots of memory,and makes computers 10x and 100x faster.enjoy. be back later if I can.

This thing is great and i've had it for many months, many many months. Before I placed it in an older computer completely, it traveled around attempting to get old PCs working and to see how they work.It currently now lies in my older computer. That computer lacks any SATA support and only has IDE, however I have a SATA card. Since I use Linux, it can't use the BIOS to access the SATA card and on top of that, there's a software RAID setup. So I just made a 4GB partition, installed grub on it and made sure the initrd images contained the SATA and RAID drivers. The system used to have 10 Hard disks in it all RAIDed together to create massive storage, but this adapter has helped me slim down to 2 1TB HDDs in a RAID 1 with SATA in a cool and efficient matter (saved 50W and the room got alot quieter). Since it's IDE, any OS can use it. So if you are doing something like I did, then this is a requirement.However, depending on the layout and construction of the IDE slots of your motherboard it might slip out. On one system I had to tape it in so it would stay in, while on another system it fit and it didn't fall out.Be sure your CF card supports DMA, otherwise you will be stuck in PIO mode, which is CPU intensive and slow.