SYBA SY-IDE2CF-NB25 Ultra IDE to Compact Flash Adapter

Pros: Price, mounts.

Cons: None so far

Overall Review: Bought to use in an old firewall. I like this adapter because it is the same size as a 2.5" hard drive and has threaded holes which should line up with the original mounts. Installed in an old Nokia IP 120 firewall. Due to the mounting holes, I was able to screw it down to the logic board to ensure it would not move. Now I have a firewall with no moving parts!

Pros: see other thoughts...

Cons: see other thoughts...

Overall Review: I made a mistake. Like someone else said before me, use 3.3v on cards with UDMA5. Use 5v on UDMA4 cards and below. 3.3v is the right pin setting for UDMA5. Mine came from the Egg already set for 3.3v, which was right for the Transcend 300x CF card I used. Sorry for the confusion!

Pros: Allows one to use a CF card as a hard drive. Cheap. Fit standard 2.5" IDE connector.

Cons: None, really.

Overall Review: Paired this with a Transcend 300X CF card @ 8GB, installed in a Thinkpad x31, installed Linux, Took about an hour (to do the hardware and software) and WOW - what a speed increase over the 5400RPM drive that was in there. Laptop runs cooler and I have not done any benching but I know battery life has to increase.

Pros: Price Still kickin' after 2.5 years

Cons: Pins were bent when I got it, had to straighten them when I installed it.

Overall Review: Just thought I would update my review from 1/29/2009. I still use my Acer Aspire at least weekly but it's getting a little long in the tooth. OEM 4200 RPM disk took about 4.5 minutes to boot XP MCE with Acer bloatware. This adapter with a 300x CF card took just shy of 1 minute to boot XP MCE optimized for fast booting. This Adapter with 300x CF card takes 35 seconds flat to go from full off to searching google with Ubuntu 10.04 (including the time it takes me to enter my logon password)!

Pros: Looks to be a well-made product. I like the jumper for voltage. Was able to confirm the adapter itself works by connecting it to a 44pin ATA-to-USB adapter, and plugging it into a USB port. The 32GB Transcend 400x CF card popped up no problem.

Cons: Unfortunately, my Fujitsu Lifebook S2110 (2005 model, AMD Tirion64, 2GB RAM, ATI X200 chipset) did not recognize any ATA drive when this adapter was substituted for the hard disk. The notebook has two ATA bus, one for the HDD and one for the optical drive. Both drives are set to master for their respective bus. But even with the optical drive removed just in case, and the jumper on master/slave/cable sel, voltage to 5 or 3.3, the BIOS just does not see any ATA drive there, nor are any errors reported. It also sees no ATA drive when a 1GB microdrive is inserted instead of the CF card.

Overall Review: I wish it worked in place of the HDD. It works when connected via ATA-USB adapter. The Transcend CF card works when plugged into a Cardbus adapter on the same notebook, too. Unfortunately I cannot boot it off the Cardbus slot, or this might be an acceptable workaround.

Pros: Can make an old laptop useful again without the expense of an SSD. I bought three of these paired with Transcend's 2G CF card. All worked perfectly in my three Thinkpads (circa 2001). They fit the disk caddy perfectly and speeded up the system while quieting them down to dead silence.

Cons: The CF cards that I used are tiny and have minimal extra space. I just primarily use the browser anyway and if I need more space, I can use a USB stick. Bigger CF cards are just as expensive as an SSD.

Overall Review: I loaded Puppy Linux (and a derivative Browserlinux) on mine and they work great. 2GB is more than enough for that, in fact, it would probably fit on a 256MB card. To get a card big enough for Windows, you might as well get a proper SSD.

Pros: I actaully rate this adapter 5 stars based on electrical, features, and the IDE connector. I dropped the rating 1 star only based on a mechanical mounting issue specific to my laptop's requirements. See Cons for those details. I used this adapter to replace the HDD drive in my laptop with a 32GB Wintec CF. I had to add another adapter between this card and Dell's IDE edge connector socket. This 2nd adapter is a Dell PN 8267R IDE Interposer/Connector and plugs onto the CF adapter's IDE pins. To complete the installation just plug it into the laptop HDD Bay's IDE socket.

Cons: I would have given this adapter 5 stars except for the following, purely mechanical, issue. This specifically has to do with mounting this adapter into Dell Inspiron 8600 HDD tray which is used to secure the IDE drive into the HDD Bay of this laptop. The hard disk screws into this tray from the sides of the 2.5" drive but this adapter only afford 2 bottom screw mount sockets. The CF adapter mechanical mounting screw sockets are located such that I have to adjust how to mount this adapter card into the laptop's HDD adapter tray. I could use double sided sticky tape to fix in onto the tray OR drill to bottom holes in the tray and use 2 flathead screws to secure the CF adapter in the Dell HDD tray. Either approach is a bit tricky and untested by me so far but quite doable. It would be nice if this CF adapter card came with 4 mounting screw sockets, instead of just 2, plus perpendicular brackets to be used to screw the CF adapter into a side-mount 2.5" HDD bay.

Pros: Worked without a hitch the first time to replace the 2.5" IDE drive in my aging CF-29. I flashed Puppy Linux 4.3.1 to the card without so much as a hiccup from the Puppy Universal Installer using the "write to CF device that will later be used as a boot medium" option. I used an old IOGear multi-card reader attached over USB to write the CF and used FAT-32 as that seems to boot most reliably. I will experiment with more modern file systems soon but the nature of installing to a CF-29 made me want to make it work for certain the first time.

Cons: None that I can see. This process was painless and it worked the first time.

Overall Review: The EM shielded drive bay and drive protection package on a CF-29 like mine (early model -- dunno if it improved) is a unique pain to deal with, but the PCB and CF card fit the form factor, and I didn't have any problems. Puppy recognized the wireless but not the cell modem. Take away: This seems to be a good match with the 2.5" form factor.