Elecity 44-Pin Male IDE to SD Card Adapter

I bought this to replace a 340MB drive in an older laptop running DOS 6.2 and WIN95.It works great. Bootable. Fast. Makes great SSD for older machines.I recommend the SanDisk "ULTRA" series SD card for their speed and advanced "wear leveling", as the File Allocation Table area takes a lot of beating. The "Ultra" is the one with the lifetime warranty. While doing research on this, I had a lot of emailing to SanDisk over this issue. They do not want to get into the business of supporting their product used in this way, but they did share that their product could handle the FAT wear issue. They did not want to walk me through all the partitioning and formatting issues for retrofit to ancient hardware. I could certainly understand.I do not mean to shill by outright recommending a vendor. I have - for a long time - been familiar with write endurance issues associated with EEPROM technologies. Knowing this limitation, I have been very cautious about designing EEPROM based technology into anything that requires substantial rewriting. I saw an ad announcing SanDisk's new ULTRA technology, and it kindled a volley of email between me and SanDisk. I know the intense rewriting that goes on in a computer disk memory, and did not want to needlessly fry EEPROM chips trying to use them this way. SanDisk tells me their new wear-leveling algorithms reroute heavily used areas in such a way as to evenly cycle all the memory cells of the device. When I look at the wear distributed across 8 gigabytes, well, I won't live long enough to wear it out. I do not know about others' technologies, but I do know if the File Allocation Table becomes corrupted, the rest of the memory becomes inaccessible, as the OS has no idea where the data is.Technical notes:I reformatted the SD card to FAT16 to be compatible with DOS6.2 and WIN95. This was done with the old DOS FDISK and FORMAT commands. Since I used a 8GB SD card, I had to partition it into four 2GB partitions to accommodate the 2GB limit of the older BIOS and FAT16.At first try, when deleting the original 8GB FAT32 (non-dos) partition with the old FDISK, it refused to see how big the SD was and only saw 1GB. Go ahead and create the 1GB partition, shut down. Now, use FDISK to delete the FAT16 partition you just created, and it will now see the whole 8GB. Do not try to create your C: partition any larger than 2GB. Mark the primary (C:) partition "Active". Mark the rest as extended partition, then create D:, E:, F: in the extended partition as guided by FDISK. Then do your FORMAT C: /S from your boot disk. Then do the FDISK /MBR to initialize the boot record on the SD. At this time, you should now be able to boot up into the biggest hard drive that machine has ever seen. Go ahead and FORMAT D:, E:, and F: for additional 2GB each.I have used LapLink3 (DOS file transfer program) and Ghost50 (DOS disk imaging program) on these. No problems.Warning: Mind your Pin1! Its the square copper pad on the 44-pin connector. The connector can be plugged in upside down, with likely disastrous results. Make sure Pin1 on the connector mates with the pin1 of the cable ( denoted by one wire different color from the rest ). On my installation, this resulted in the LED's on the interface board looking at the floor of the bay while the SD card facing up. This is on MY machine. YOUR machine may need the other orientation. The important thing is minding Pin1.The connector comes with all pins populated. Many disk drives have a pin toward the center broken off as a "key" to prevent inadvertent reversal. You may have to break a pin off ( easy enough ) to make it fit. Use your existing drive as a guide as to which one to break off. Remember, mind your pin1! You do not get a "do-over" if you break off the wrong one.But, all in all, I am very pleased with this device. The whole thing is so light you can just wrap it up in some cardboard and place it back in the drive bay using a bit of duct tape. I am sure they made it this way so that you would have a "universal fit". They did a good job of making a viable product for a limited market and held the cost down.As other reviewers noted, this ships with absolutely NO documentation. That is why I posted my technical notes.If you are a little foggy on DOS, this should give you an idea of what its gonna take to get this device working in your machine.What you will get is the assembled circuit card, packaged in an antistatic bag. Outside of its packaging, the connector pins are exposed. You need to be careful about ESD and also not bend the pins. Again, I must warn you about minding Pin1. A slip-up here will be irreversible. If you botch FDISK or FORMAT, you can always delete and start over, but you cannot undo fried parts. If you have worked around hard drives before, you will most likely know exactly what to do. If you have not, find someone who has.If you know your way around FORMAT and FDISK, know about active partitions and initializing master boot records, this product should install almost identical to how a "raw" hard drive would install. It did for me. As you know, there are whole chapters in computer books delegated to installation of hard drives.I support old industrial equipment with embedded PC controllers, and this purchase was for me to familiarize myself with another option to keep old dinosaurs alive. Its getting hard to get smaller IDE drives compatible with the older hardware. So far, this device is passing my tests with flying colors.

I love the idea of this, but it did not work for me in my old IBM T43 as a replacement for my traditional spindle IDE drive.I put an SD card in the adapter and was able to install Arch using a live USB. The install worked, but grub would not load beyond the first line of text. Something like "GRUB loading". Same thing after zeroing out the drive and trying with syslinux. It said something like "SYSLINUX EDD" but went no further. No cursor, no boot: prompt. Nothing.When I tried the exact same SD card in an SD card USB reader it booted with no issue.So great idea, but it did not do what I needed. The description reads "With this adapter, the host PC will identify the inserted SD card as a standard IDE hard disk. As such, you can install any operating systems and the SD card will be bootable"That was not so in my case.

I can't be certain that it didn't work at all, just that it didn't work in the devices I was trying to use it with. I have a hard drive audio recorder that uses IDE drives and was looking to use SDHC cards as an alternative solution.The device also did not work in an IDE to firewire adapter external drive as well.I don't really have another device to test this in.

This is not the item shown in the picture. It is the same one chip item that most others sell which has many compatible issues. Also, it is shipped from China and takes forever.

I bought this to replace a 2-1/2 inch hard disk.The device is working fine with a 2 GB SD card.As others have mentioned, the device comes with no documentation and the connector isn't keyed. However, at least in my case, pin 1 was clearly identified with a square solder pad.I would have liked to use a larger memory card, and I expect the device probably supports SDHC cards, but there is nothing saying that it does, or what the maximum capacity it supports might be.

I originally bought this for my AppleTV (to replace the internal harddrive with an SD card), which made me bump into a few issues;1) most IDE connectors and cables have one pin missing for alignment purposes.This one however has all pins installed, which means that you either have to cut a put (and you have a 50/50 change to screw that one up, or make a hole in the connector you want to insert this card in (wish I would have gone that route).2) Pin 1 is extremely poorly indicated which makes step 1 an even bigger gamble.In the end I managed to get it to work, but the AppleTV refuses to boot from it ... so if you're thinking of using it for an AppleTV: don't!If you do and get it to work properly in an AppleTV (1st gen) then please let me know :)Otherwise this product seems of a reasonable quality.

I used this along with an old SD card to replace a defective hard drive in a very old laptop. Everything works fine and the machine is now back online running Linux like a champ.Just keep in mind that the IDE interface is SLOW... don't blame the SD card.

slow but fun to play with. maybe a faster SD card will speed it up.