Modern Hard Drive Alternatives for old Laptops and Thin Clients 

I love CF to IDE adapters. Makes my life so much easier whenever I want quick access times, but don't feel like finding a compatible SSD or bothering with a SATA to IDE adapter.

for old IDE laptops an option I like is an adapter with a 2.5" drive form factor, that has two CF slots working in master and slave, so you can have 2 storage CF devices fit in a single hdd slot. For my IBM Thinkpad T42p, I can have one 128GB CF card for win98, and another 2TB CF card (when they become available, currently 512GB are the largest ones) for winXP. The adapter exists, look around ebay, doesn't seem to have a particular model name but its there.

Nice reviews. I have a old Toshiba Terca 8000 laptop that I was using for DOS and WIN 98 programs and games. I've been worrying about the age of the hard drive and stopped using it. Now I can go back to it with one of these products. Thank you.

Daaaaang I didn't know all of these adapters existed! I knew of a few but you have really enlightened me to the others. Awesome video Phil!!

Thanks for the video! I was wondering how I was going to set up my thin client, but now I have some guidance :) Much appreciated!

Loved the coverage in this video. I already own three adapters you show here which are the SD card to 44-pin, Compact Flash to 44-pin and an MSATA to 44-pin. One important note I would like to add with that very last adapter is to remind people there are two m.2 connections labeled type m and type b. MOST important is if you buy an adapter you MUST purchase an m.2 SATA - you CANNOT use an m.2 NVMe! If you wind up with an NVMe m.2 SSD and you try to use any adapter with one... you're going to have a bad time. The reason for this is because NVMe m.2 SSDs come with their own controller and attach to the pci-e interface which goes without saying you cannot connect a pci-e card to your sata connection; it just won't happen, lol! So just make sure you get the SATA version of an m.2 card for one of these adapters!

Very good help ! Thanks man!

Just in time, searched for alternatives for dying IDE Drives, thanks!

I have to say I agree with you on the SD-cards. They are cheap, perform extremely well, and are so easy to get working. Secondary is IDE to SATA adapters so you can use a modern SATA SSD in and old PC, although this only works in desktops, it's great for both performance and convenience.

I quite like the msata to 2.5 ide converters, recently put one in my Thinkpad T42 and really like it

Good choices! With most of those there's much less power use, heat generation and no waiting for spin-up too. Perfect traits alongside just performance when keeping very old machines in active service.

Another alternative for thinclients is to use a usb flash drive. Some the HP Thinclients like the T5530 have 2 hidden USB ports inside the case, and I've installed linux on a usb flash drive this way, albeit USB 2.0 speeds.

Good solid info, thanks for sharing!

You can in most cases remove the housing from a 2.5" ssd and many of the smaller ones only take up half the length of the housing and that way they can fit in more places, just do not forget to wrap it in plastic and/or electrical tape to protect against shortsurquits.

Thank you very much for this video! At the moment I try to restore and speed up an old laptop with a PIII and 1GB of RAM for a DOS / Win98 system. Great work! I think I'll go for the M.2 SATA to 44 PIN adapter. Can't wait to see the true performance of an IDE controller ;-)

I run an msata->IDE box in my Powerbook G4 and it is quite nice.

This is a great video from one of the best

Yay! New Phil video!

This video is great. I have a few Amiga computers that would benefit from a few of these adapters as finding period correct hardware in good working condition such as hard drives is getting harder to find and more expensive.

Tempting solutions you are posting here too, so I may have to take some notes to apply for both retro and more modern machines such as my storage server. It currently uses IDE to run the OS, as all the SATA ports are occupied for storage of files.

Great video Phil

Storage Option Number 4 : Failed to fit in old Dell laptops. Instead of bidirectional, i should have bought horizontal adapter of the same type. Lesson learnt for 5$ :) Good video as always Phil, thanks !

Nice comparison, I am a fan of SSD's (2.5 inch and M.2 (NVME) type for anything that I can, access times and speeds are unbeatable and prices for retro gaming (120GB - 240GB) are great. Plus most SSD's (varies by brand) have things like over provisioning / TRIM support / etc. to minimize cell wear. If I can't go with SSD's I fall back to SD card / Compact Flash / 2.5 HDD (Spinning Disk) in that order. I prefer SD card because of 1) convenience (adapters are everywhere) 2) performance 3) cost.

sounds great to revive the old laptops.

Video well explanatory, good to know that there are better options besides IDE disks. Too bad the value of the dollar being so high in Brazil, would make a nice upgrade in my notebooks.

I'm in the middle of a Win98 build around an Athlon Thunderbird @ 1GHz (just waiting on a couple parts), and one thing I really liked about something I saw LGR use recently for larger machines is an SD card adapter with a bracket for your rear PCI/etc. slots. Probably more for Win98 and older machines, but I love the idea of being able to just yank the SD card from the back of the case without needing to open it, then popping said card into a more modern machine to transfer some files at high speed. Maybe use a disk imager to do a routine backup of your retro machine once in a while, or just to transfer that really big game-that-came-on-a-DVD without pushing it over a network share or something. With the SD, CF, and even full-size SATA drives of course you can still yank them with these just by popping the case, but I'd assume getting adapters or docks for mSATA and M.2 drives is a bit tougher and something you'd have to keep around dedicated for purpose. Most laptops have SD card slots in them nowadays, which is why I'm going that route, at least for now. I might try and dual-boot between Win98SE and a modern Linux distribution though, and in the latter case something more permanently attached makes a lot of sense. Great roundup, thanks!

I've had no luck with the 44pin to cf adapters you display here. Tried numerous cards and none worked in all the systems I have, although all cf cards worked just fine in a xt2ide solution. The 44pin to sd you mention works flawless in all systems I have.

Awesome video, thanks a lot. :) Just a small question, why CF isn't necessarily a good recommendation for XP?

Very nice video, thanks for making it! I think I'll go with the SD to 44pin adapter. I would really like to see a comparison of Chinese VGA to HDMI adapters some day from you, for retro gaming. :)

A couple of things I found from a bit of googling. There are M.2 adapters to IDE that will take up a space like an expansion card which could be quite neat for desktop machines and for some reason I can't quite work out I found an M.2 end to USB3.0 internal socket conversion card.

I was watching these videos just to hear your recommendations on the subject. I've tried quite a few options and I think CF cards have to be my favorite overall - I've never really had "problems" with them running up to Windows XP on them, and I can't imagine them being that much slower with write times than a spinning disk drive. I guess the biggest problem with CF cards is the high price of them - SD cards are far cheaper for comparable storage space. I have tried a few IDE to SD adapters but have had various success with them - some older machines (Win3/95 era) seem to have problems with them with the drive becoming corrupted after a short time - I have no idea if this has anything to do with improper/non-existent wear leveling or something else to do with the specific adapters themselves, but I have had poor luck with SD overall. I have never tried one of the mSATA/M2 adapter cards, but they seem like a neat idea - and these days the format has dropped to a price even lower than CF cards. That being said, many of the CF devices just "slide in" or have brackets/mounts where you can just pop them out externally, bring them to a modern PC, write some files, and pop them back in - I feel like I would lose some of that convenience with a mSATA/M2 adapter ...

Phil, Thanks for letting me know about CF and only recommending them only with Windows 98 and Below because I almost was going to go with a CF route with a Gateway M675 P4 based laptop with XP on it but I am going to go ahead and purchase an IDE/PATA SSD and leave it at that because of the way XP handles CF cards as removable media which is not compatible with the page file. I don't want to have to disable the paging file because alot of programs require it. Yeah they made IDE/PATA SSDs . I have an old modern HP laptop with 1st generation Core i series CPU and it has the weird 1.8in Hard drive so I thought of getting a MSATA to 1.8in HDD adapter for that to speed stuff up but never got around to it. I just helped my dad fix and old Windows NT based PC that had a dying small HDD in it so I told him to go the CF route since it's more reliable and can make backups of it easier.

In my experience; if you can't find a SD-to-IDE adapter card but want to use cheap (Micro)SD for an old system, one can use MicroSD-to-CF module and plug that in to a CF-to-IDE card, the conversion from (Micro)SD to IDE being done in the module itself. I had to set up such a combo for my old XP-era gaming Retro Rig (wanted to avoid using HDD or SATA drives) using a CF-to-IDE card from eBay & MicroSD-to-CF module from Australia Computer Online up in Sydney in the past year and it's worked fairly well in my case.

Nice to see the Kingdian M.2. I have a 480 GB SSD from them through Aliexpress that works just fantastic. The prices on it with shipping included was very good. I think the others on the channel might enjoy a comparison video of SSD, M.2 and mSATA.

I'm a fan of newly converted fan of mSATA, and a big reason for that is that Samsung makes (current gen) SSDs for them. You can get a 250GB Samsung 860 mSATA for like $100 or less, and they're really good. I grabbed two of them and two of those interfaces with a case, so I've got one setup for IDE and the other for SATA. Works in any machine I throw them into, desktop or laptop doesn't matter. :) Not sure how well they'd work in DOS and/or older configs though, might be too big for that. I'm on an XP roll right now so haven't tried yet, hehe. I should probably get one of those SD card thingies you have there, looks perfect for DOS machines. I'm asssuming M.2 will replace mSATA in the future though, we'll see.

Great video!

Hi Phil. Really enjoy your videos, even inspired me to get a HP T5710. I was wondering which thin client you're using in this video since I don't recognize it from your other videos. Thanks Evan

This video is also very helpful for DIY car mechanics. Even late model vehicles sometimes use PATA drives due to the simplicity interfacing with embedded systems using old SoC's. I plan to convert my Volvo XC60's and XC90's navigation systems to a PATA SSD. In the BMW community it is also very popular to upgrade the BMW CIC PATA drive to a SSD, as the QNX system stores a considerable amount data on the PATA drive.

I ordered a CF2IDE for my P-II laptop

Great vid! People could keep in mind when getting SSDs, that SATA 2 is half as fast as SATA 3, but should still saturate the bus of older computers. Getting a used SSD could be sketchy but something to consider.

Excellent

@philscomputerlab what thinkpad was that?

Hi, very nice video! , it gives hope.. I have an IBM thinkpad R52, could you recommend me a set up for SSD you think may work? Thank you very much

This somehow reminded me I need to restore my Thinkpad R50-e...

On the small msata to ide adapter there is a 5V to 3.3V linear converter sitting just below the pcb of the msata ssd. It runs terribly hot which severely limits the lifespan of the ssd. Be aware!

SD cards marked A1 are supposed to be best for OS uses. I hope to upgrade two XP /DOS laptops to SD cards. I hope to use a 40 pin IDE to SD solution on and old DOS desktop. I hope to replace my IDE HDDs with SD cards soon. I prefer to keep my Retro machines running as real metal as long as possible. In time I'd like to link them up with VM version on my newer machines. The DOS laptop may make a nice Linux terminal. My old machines have serial ports on them. USB dongles will give my newer stuff multi station abilities.. My computing life started with Teletype Model 33 terminals, and low speed dial up. Happy Retrocomputing and restro gaming everyone. Thanks for all your help.

Have you ever tried a PCMCIA adapter card? I know they make them for compact flash cards.

Nice. Just what I need when I resurrect the old Win9x setups (I have a cranky P4-2.4GHz that won't accept more than 768mb RAM, but is good otherwise, that should work well for this). I've tried an SD-to-IDE adapter and a SATA-to-IDE unit, and both worked perfectly, but hadn't heard of the rest. The CF option is especially interesting, and makes me wonder if there's a way to reverse that (ie. to use an SSD to replace a CF card). Only problem I've run into is that the SD to IDE adapter has stuff sticking out that makes it a bitch to mount, so the only real practical method is to just dangle it off the end of the cable rather than trying to screw it into anywhere. Tried different mounts and no joy. It booted right up first try, tho. As someone mentioned there do exist IDE SSDs; I have a 64GB that I used to upgrade an old Mac G4.

I have been accumulating a large collection of drives of various sizes and form factors (from 16GB up to 4TB, from 44pin IDE mechanical to SATA SSD to Mechanical SAS), and I'm always fascinated by using unconventional storages like an SD card or CF disk...

Great guide Phil! BTW. Anyone got an SD card related AD?

Tip: if your thin client somehow has a PCIe slot, it can be used for a Samsung 950 Evo NVMe drive. That, and a few other NVMe drives, comes with a BIOS Option ROM inside the controller chip with a basic NVMe driver on it (reporting itself as a SCSI storage controller,) allowing the BIOS to pick up NVMe support and boot from that drive.

kinda weird that this video came right as i was considering storage solution for my Win XP retro build..I want a BAy on the front of the machine so that i can swap out different storage medium...and one in the back of the machine for the same purpose..i considered compact flash but this video kinda convinced me i should use either regular sata drive or micro SD..what medium is best for a Win XP machine?..BTW ..anyone who gives a thumbs down on any of your videos is a jerk...LOL..Love your Stuff!

You're the best. Aroooound.

Is that a ThinkPad R40 in the video

any more info on that cable that blew up a thin client? I have a couple on their way from china, and I'd like to avoid the blowing up part if possible (planning to add a 2.5 ide drive to the Terra client).

12:52 I thought 16MB size. What a confusing brand name is.

I was stumped by an obscure laptop drive recently, a 1.8 inch IDE drive connected by a ZIF cable/connector. Google didn't help when I had no idea what it was called. Fortunately, a random image search of portable drive types revealed all.

I have an Dell D90D7 with an internal half slim 16gb ssd, i want to increase this to 64 or more gb (i can only find drive up to 32gb), do you have any suggestion about where to find any of those drive? Do you have any experience with Kingspec or Kingdian from Aliexpress?

I have used the same SSD a Kingston 120GIG in my main Windows 7 PC for the past 7 years so they must last a long time in constant use ..i never thought they would lol . I also had a problem with adapters (Msata) some units dont work in an adapter ..strange i know .

Okay let's start with the compact flash, it's compact, does exactly what it says on the card. Access-times will be limited, though do keep in mind that it is very fast @ 120mb/s. Can in some cases improve cpu access times. I'd like to think fast ssd storage improves access times as well as speed, so if you choose the right ssd for the job, some gains can be had. Though with +120% in access-times @ 30-34mb/s, You'd be pretty lucky to get any gain at all.

Can you pre install win98 on any of these so the thin client can boot and set up drivers with out installing it while in the client? Booting from fdd and installing win 98 was a nightmare, not for a novice to do with out help. Is there a possibility of down loading a disc image of your thin clients to use in ours? The installation can be lengthy and I really could use the help. All we need is that when you finished your installation/video you save a copy of the disc image we can download. Perhaps users can submit their disc images to you and you keep a data base of helpful pre installed images? Is there such a thing as usb to 44 pin adapter for writing to these discs outside of the clients?

I recently Got an Fujitsu futro s900 thin client with a amd T56N APU and 4gb ram for 25€, bought an msata ssd with 32gb for 16€ from TCSunbow and installed Windows 10 on it. Runs Kodi and Retroarch, very Silent and Great Performance while also being Really Cheap.

I can recommend the SD card adapter, i tried it myself with a toshiba satellite pentium1 laptop. But sometimes it depends on the laptop maker, for example i have an old dell 5000e pentium3 laptop that refuses to boot with the sd card adaptor, so im waiting for a CF card adapter instead for that one. ALSO PHIL some sd card brands will give problems, and some wont even let you fdisk, the first thing you should do is to delete all partitions on the sd card with a program like minitool partition wizard and leave it raw. then use MSDOS6.22 floppy and let it do its magic.

is there anything I need to look out for with compatibility with systems with older bios when selecting which type to use in a laptop?

Trying to use a WD Blue 500GB hard drive in a Windows 95 PC with an old motherboard, is a SATA-to-IDE adapter all I need, or do I need to mess around with hard drive jumpers or BIOS settings as well?

Nice video

do SD to IDE adapters require or support the Trim command? I'm using one for my win98 build, and i don't want it to die just because of my ignorance.

I purchased an M SATA SSD to a IDE connection adaptor, that comes with the enclosure to make up a 2.5" SSD , it fits nicely into the laptop. The problem is that the laptop won't boot from it or even see it, I have loaded an Ubuntu operating system onto it from a CD, but I just can't figure out what the problem is.

Nice

What would you recommend for my old HP Pavilion dv1589ea? Is buying an SSD worth it?

Wow these devices are really cheap out there! Where i live the price of any ssd (sata, msata, m.2) prices are still outrageous! Also the adapters are a bit expensive too. Thats very unfortunate.

I think it will be better to include original IDE flash module which is included in many thin clients. Just to see how much performance gained :)

Great video. Thanks!!!! I have a Canon 5D which uses CF storage. I want to use msata or sata as storage but cant find a mSata to CF Card adapter . Can anyone help me out ? PLEASE ?

I like SD cards and CF cards since they are much easier to transfer files or make an image of the drive using a modern PC.

On the m.2 is it normal for the black chip on the board the one with the silver strip underneath to get really hot i mean i know it'll get a bit warm but not be able to touch it ?

great!

Hey Phil, I noticed that using CF cards on more modern OS like XP causes the OS drive to mount as a removable drive which causes some oddities (like the page file not working because it can't be on a removable device). My research online pointed me to use a Hitachi Microdrive filter driver, but I never seemed to get it working correctly. Have you had any similar experiences and maybe a resolution?

Why did you not include PATA ssds was it due to their higher pricing? They do save you the need for an adapter and the speed doesn't bottleneck the controller

Can you make a video for alternatives for mfm drives? ( There are some Isa cards that work with sd cards or compact flash)

I have several cf-ide adapters and bought some lexar 4gb cards that are ide compatible. They are detected by my CF-25 MKIII and NT4 setup will format and write to them, but when I reboot to finish installation it won't boot from the cf cards. I tried again with a 10gb hard drive and it worked. I have IDE noncompatible cards for comparison and the laptop will not detect them, so I am unsure my issue. Suggestions?

I bought a SD to IDE 44pin adapter and run ubuntu mate on it but having issues with it, after you install the OS on the SD it runs find but some how if you leave the it off the OS gets corrupted and can't boot up for some reason?

if a 2.5" ssd is too big, you can most likely just open it and take the module out. they tend to be like 1/3 of the actual size of the 2.5'' enclosure

I'll try the SD to 44pin adapter, but with 64gb (and up) because they have better read and write speeds (Uhs3 + 100nb read / 90write). What about comparing many of them and trying bootable?

The small IDE connector / pin layout lets you plug the drive backwards, I know because I killed my Thinkpad X40 drive that way.

I've been thinking about replacing the IBM drive in my pentium2 ThinkPad with a sd card but it will take away from the retro feel, that hard drive makes loud seek noises lol and has only 300 hours on it

For the M.2 one, I had trouble with getting my Toshiba 440CDT, unfortunately.

Hi Phil. I have been given a Toshiba Satellite 2060 CDS laptop (AMD K6 - 366MHz cpu) which powered up briefly before the old IDE HDD died completely. I formatted a 3.5” floppy using FeeDOS and it boots OK. Just HDD is dead. I want to replace the drive with a solid state 4GB drive and was thinking about either a PCMCIA-Compact Flash card adapter or an IDE - Compact Flash adapter. I’ve seen SD card to CF card units - basically a CF card into which you can place one or two SD cards. I was wondering which option would be best in the long run? I intend to clean the laptop up and use it to play old DOS and Windows 98 games. With a couple of cards I could boot to either OS. However, I read that Windows 98 swap files can dramatically shorten a CF cards life span. Would this be the same for an SD card/CF card adapter? Which option would you recommend? Is the PCMCIA card adapter going to be slower than an internal IDE/CF card adapter? Are there issues in having an IDE/CF card/SD card combo over IDE/CF card? I hope you understand my message. I’m wondering if the IDE/CF/SD card adapter might be more “future proof” than a simple IDE/CF adapter. The Toshiba specs show AMD K6-2 CPU, 32MB RAM, 4.3GB hard drive and Windows 98.

ThinkPad

if a Samsung q1 ultra i picked up awhile back wasnt as messed up as it was and i didnt have the Lenovo thinkpad yoga 260 i was considering converting the q1 ultra to using sdxc instead of the zif based hdd it bad and i even considered fiding a replacement battery for it at one time but due to severe issues with the screen (i havent tried seeing it the issues appears on a external screen) i abandoned the project

Those Apacer and similar DOM (Disk On Module) IDE flash devices are notT too robust. They do not stand up well to having a swap file on them. They're intended for embedded applications where an OS is installed that is optimized to not need virtual memory and either runs from RAM or very rarely writes to the DOM. If you must run an OS that needs virtual memory, set things up to create a RAMdisk during boot and put the swap file there. Of course that makes some of the RAM unusable by the OS, which can be an issue if you're wanting to try Windows 95 or 98 on a thin client that maxes out at 512 meg RAM.

update! 2.5 inch can be installed with an adapter! for this it is necessary to pull out from the box. in 80% of cases, it takes half the box

Gnome is my preferred Linux DE for laptops in general. If only it had a lighter edition to use with older computers.

Have you tried one of the IDE SSD drives? Curious if we need to worry about wear and tear with those and if performance is good?

i have had a 128gb ssd in my main machine for 4 years now and i didn’t use any preservation methods and it is still going strong. the ssd puts the data to cause the least amount of ware so don’t worry about preserving an ssd. unless its an really old ssd that is just a couple gb

could you do a video about thin clients please? also this video was very helpful and interesting.

So where do you get old small ata cables 133?

I bought some cheap IDE-SD card adapter on ali and it's very slow, speed is limited to cca 25 MB/s, it's probably ok for some 90s notebook, but when you need something for Pentium 4 or something little more modern, it's very slow.

Have you ever tested any 1.8" HDDs? You should be able to use a more modern 1.8" (micro)sata drive with a 2.5 ide adapter and it should still fit into a standard 2.5 drive bay.

There are SSDs with hardware trim support. In that case you don't have to worry about garbage collection. Also there are ide ssd, but they are pricey

Compatibility depends in large part on the host system and its BIOS/firmware. I am currently working with an old Alpha system (DEC AlphaPC 164) and it does not like too much the CF and SD cards presented through an IDE adapter. Yes it can use them but it treats them as removable devices - which tells me that they are not working in true IDE mode but rather in PIO mode. And it's not dependent on the particular CF or SD card, I tried many brands with the same results. That limits what you can install - for instance I was able to install Windows NT Alpha on a CF card but the installer complained several times that I'm installing on a removable device, it limited what size of partitions I could make etc. What did work quite well on this platform were: 1. SSD through SATA/IDE converter 2. microSD through SCSI2SD adapter (rev.5.0b) to SCSI card.