Syba Dual Compact Flash CF to 44 Pin IDE/PATA 2.5" Adapter Enclosure, Black SD-ADA45006

I bought this to replace the IDE HDD drive in my G3 Lombard.So far it's been working well. Speeds are good, considering the IDE interface limitations. I haven't had any weird compatibility issues, like some more complicated SSD to IDE adapters have.The installation is easy; just plug and play. The dual card support mounts one drive as 'Master' and the other as 'Slave'. This is nice to provide additional space. I use the second drive as a paging/scratch drive to reduce reads and writes on the main drive when I can.

Phenomenal device. Reads fast, writes fast, and turns a tiny CF card into the form factor of a 3.5" hard drive. Has been working great for me for nearly a year now.

Tried it first in a Dell D610 and it did not work, either with the 16GB Komputerbay CF card I bought to use in it, or with a smaller SanDisk card I had lying around. The Dell BIOS did not recognize a drive was present. I expected to have to return it after that, but before deciding, I tried it in a desktop system using a 3.5 to 2.5 IDE adapter, and that system recognized it. So I put it in a G4 Mac Mini, and it worked fine there as well. I did have to remove one pin, as other reviewers have said. That's a weird design omission, since every 2.5" IDE drive I've ever seen has a keyed pinout. But it does fit in where a 2.5" drive goes, and it works in the Mac Mini which is what I really bought it for. With the 600X 90MB/s CF card, it's considerably faster than the 4200rpm mechanical drive it replaced, but it's hard to say exactly how much faster because I'm running Debian and not OSX now.I noticed during testing that there are two colored LEDs inside the casing, which light up to indicate operation. They don't hurt anything, but I wondered why they bothered to include them, since for most people this is a laptop drive replacement and will never be visible.Would probably buy again if I needed to replace an IDE drive in a small form factor machine, but how often does that come up, really?

This flagship arranger Synth from 1997 can be expanded with one of these! Just put this in your Hard drive slot and format the CF Card, then you're good to go! Useful for storing long samples and lots of MIDI files!

I bought this to replace the hard drive in a fit-PC Slim fit-PC Slim Linux so it would run in silent, no-moving part mode.Visually the adapter looks like right size, but when compared to the Fujitsu 60GB drive it replaced, it is both thicker (9.5mm vs 9.0 mm) and effectively longer. In my fit-pc the thickness prevented the adapter from sliding in to the space vacated by the hard drive - there is a slot on the right inside cover where the adapter would not fit in. (To make it fit, I had to remove the top black plastic cover.)Although the actual overall length is the same (100mm), when the cable connector is attached (and I had to bend all of the pins away from the circuit board to get the connector to 'seat'), the connector still sticks out to extend the length of the unit. This is the same connector that allowed to Fujitsu hard drive to fit perfectly. Doubtful another connector would work better as the connector did seat against the black angle pin block. Remember, the fit-pc is very small and its IDE connector is also, so I think Syba just didn't consider this in the size (pin length) and placement (relative to the circuit board) of the angle pin connector block.So I had to trim off the last 1.5mm of the bottom cover. I tried to just put the circuit board into the fit-pc without any of the black cover, but the circuit board was just a little too free to flop around from side-to-side without it.However, after all the modifications, the adapter did indeed work with 4GB Sandisk Ultra Compact Flash card SanDisk SDCFH-004G-A11 4GB 30MB/s ULTRA CF Card (US Retail Package). I was able to boot Linux from a USB drive and install to the CF-adapter 'IDE hard drive' and the fit-pc works (quietly!)So, if you are planning to use this adapter in a space-limited (tight tolerance) location, I'd reconsider the purchase unless you don't mind modifying the adapter (likely voiding the warranty) and likely your connector cable.I have not tried installing a second CF into the slave slot, but I expect it to work. The slave card installs on the bottom and is flush with the bottom plastic cover (which I left on) so it should fit physically.Had the adapter fit both in thickness and length (or rather, had the connector fit properly and seated far enough in to not require modification, I would have rated this 5 stars.