Using a CompactFlash card as a computer hard drive replacement

Hello everyone!
Today I'm going to explain why one would want to install a CF to IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics, the internal drive standard before SATA) adapter in an old laptop (or desktop). It's worth keeping in mind that you can also use the much more popular SD card, but a CF has a big advantage, which I'll explain later.

I'm going to use my good ol' Zenith Z-Note Flex, on which I did a review on three months ago. The laptop ran windows 3.1, but I also wanted to have access to 95 whenever I needed. That's one of the reasons why it's a good idea to install one of these adapters in a system: You can store two different operating systems on two different cards. I, as an example, installed windows 95 on an eight GB card, and windows 3.1 on a one GB one.

The second reason is the flexibility: You can easily take the "solid state drive" out of your computer, and plug it in any cheap CompactFlash adapter, to easily transfer files to or from your drive. It's much more inconvenient to buy a relatively expensive IDE to USB adapter to connect old hard drives to your modern PC.

Speaking of hard drives, these do not last forever: which bring us to the third and (almost) final reason, maybe the strongest one: Hard drives die. The way they work is mechanical, and anything that's mechanical will probably have a shorter lifespan than tech that only works using electricity. Also, even hard drives that still work can develop bad sectors, parts on the surface of the disk that cannot be read from or written to. A faster, solid state solution, can easily become a permanent solution (even though solid state cards and drives have a limited read/write number, they will probably outlive your laptop.)

Now, the reason that only applies to CompactFlash adapters: The reason why people prefer to use CF cards on these older IDE computers, is because CompactFlash is natively compatible with the IDE interface and it's instructions. What this means, is that while a CF card will directly interface to the computer, an SD Card, if installed with a similar adapter, will need to have it's instructions translated, which requires an extra chip on the adapter's PCB, and which slows things down.

 I personally used this adapter. The only problem I had with it was the fact that I needed to find a jumper to set it to master mode. It shows it as already there in the pictures, I don't know why mine didn't come with one included. They are not hard to find at all.
Keep in mind that if you're willing to use a card on desktop PC, you should (in almost all cases) get a 40 pin IDE adapter like this one. Or you could even get a PCI bracket version.

While I certainly like the idea of using such an adapter, I prefer the good ol' sounds and the idea of a traditional hard drive. That's why, at the time of this post, I'm primarily still using a classic 1.5 GB HDD on my Zenith, in a MS-DOS 6.22/Windows 3.1 Setup.

Have an extra nice day, everybody!🦄