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What CF card to get?

twistedpneumatic

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I'm getting 2 CF cards for both my XT-IDE which is going in a PS/2 and one to go into an IDE to CF adapter in my 486 laptop. Is there any BIOS limits or recommendations for which cards to get for maximum compatibility/ease of use? I'm not lookingfor a ton of space, 512mb would be fine for both. I've heard some SanDisk cards have a fixed disk mode utility or something?
 
The only feature that I'd look for is built in wear leveling. Old DOS machines are murder on the boot sector, and Windows is murder with pagefile.

Pretty much any modern CF card is going to be tons faster than any IDE controller of the era, so you don't have to worry about bandwidth bottlenecking.

For the IBM PS/2, I'd recommend using a SCSI card and getting either a SCSI drive or a SCSI2SD adapter. This would take a big load off the CPU because IDE PIO transfers require the CPU to do all of the heavy lifting and really slow the machine down while they're in progress. The speeds you get are heavily dependent on how fast the CPU is, and you can actually hear the transfers speeding up and slowing down if you have a turbo button to toggle between the slower and faster CPU speeds.
 
The only feature that I'd look for is built in wear leveling. Old DOS machines are murder on the boot sector, and Windows is murder with pagefile.

Pretty much any modern CF card is going to be tons faster than any IDE controller of the era, so you don't have to worry about bandwidth bottlenecking.

For the IBM PS/2, I'd recommend using a SCSI card and getting either a SCSI drive or a SCSI2SD adapter. This would take a big load off the CPU because IDE PIO transfers require the CPU to do all of the heavy lifting and really slow the machine down while they're in progress. The speeds you get are heavily dependent on how fast the CPU is, and you can actually hear the transfers speeding up and slowing down if you have a turbo button to toggle between the slower and faster CPU speeds.

Will look into wear leveling. What about the removable mode vs fixed disk mode? Heard that some of the more advanced ones can cause issues. Also what about using MicroDrives?

Its a Model 25 so I don't think that applies...but possibly. The thing is it isn't one of my "workhorse" vintage machines and I already have a XTIDE my little sister made so I'd figure I'd give her card some purpose. Its the 286 model.
 
Is there any BIOS limits or recommendations for which cards to get for maximum compatibility/ease of use?
AFAIK there isn't any limit. I tried various cards, 64 MB - 4 GB, on my Commodore 386SX-25 and my Commodore PC20-III (= XT). I only noticed that two of cards were not recognized by the PC20 and my idea is that these two cards IMHO were not able to run in 8-bits mode because they ran fine in the SX.
 
Ease of transferring files from PC and currently my PS/2 does not have a working floppy drive.

Also finding laptop 44 pin interface DOM is kind of a pain.
There are quite many 44-pin DOMs on eBay. These work very well with USB-to-IDE notebook adaptors which are also inexpensive.
 
Will look into wear leveling. What about the removable mode vs fixed disk mode? Heard that some of the more advanced ones can cause issues. Also what about using MicroDrives?

Since you'll not be hot swapping the CF card, you don't need removable mode, but both would probably work fine regardless.

I wouldn't get a micro drive unless you prefer spinning media, or need it for compatibility reasons. They're far more susceptible to damage (head strikes) and most of the units available on the market are mostly either new-old stock or used with an unknown number of hours on them.
 
What CF card to get?
Any model up to 8GB, I would say. If it's larger, 16-Bit DOS will likely be confused (as well as some FastDisk drivers for Win 3.1x will be confused).
It's not about partition sizes, but total capacity.If you can't get a smaller card, try to update the BIOS (add LBA support) or do set a manual drive geometry that's within 500MBs (CHS).
Using "1023" cylinders, "15" heads, "63" sectors should be safe (Just keep in mind that not all BIOSes count the same way - some start counting from 0, some from 1).
Alternatively, LARGE / E-CHS is also a possibility (8GB max). If nothing helps, a Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO) might help to fix things..

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=51413
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=648523
 
Two bits of advice.

1. Buy a known brand name.

2. Stay away from these:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/2GB-Compac...016532&hash=item337ba98c93:g:bykAAOxy0rZRFgYu

When I got my first XT-IDE card I tried re-using CF cards that had been used in my son's Nikon and got mixed results. Some could be set up to boot and some not, though all would reliably store files. I wanted something cheap to experiment with and bought 10 CF cards from the seller behind that ebay auction in the above link. Half were supposed to be 1.0G and half were supposed to be 2.0G. Other than the different capacities on the label, they looked and should have behaved the same when plugged into the XT-IDE -> IDE-CF rig but they didn't. Some didn't identify at all. In the case of those that the XT-IDE card could talk to, none of the actual capacities matched the advertised spec. Some were set up for C/H/S and others were LBA. Some of them actually responded with a company name that the XT-IDE card reported on the boot option screen, but out of 10 cards, no two cards reported the same company name.

Bottom line is that these turned out to be used, over labeled cards with God only knows how many miles on them already.

The good news is....... They were cheap.
 
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