Cheap, Fast Bootable IDE Solutions for Retro PCs and Macintosh

I've been working on a series of articles about the things I love about Retro Computing.  The keyboards in general were good, and some were shockingly good.  CRTs appeal to me.  I really enjoy the entire Floppy Disk experience, as that's what we used when I first learned about computers in grade school.  The older Double Density floppies actually tend to be quite long-lived when stored properly, I have 20 and 30 year old disks that still work as expected!

For me, Hard Drives fall into the "not worth the worry" category.  Flash based storage solutions are faster and they make better sense from a preservation point of view because they will keep the machine operating for a longer period of time into the future.  So, one of my ongoing goals has been to figure out what the cheapest method of providing flash based storage to these old machines is.  I'll use this article to catalog a list of solutions that I've tried.  I'm going to cover, total cost per unit (regardless of capacity), cost per GB, Speed, and other considerations.

I've used a couple of different options for IDE machines.  First is using a CF card in place of an IDE drive inside of PCs. For tower and desktop machines, I like to keep the drive accessible from the back, so I prefer these simple passive circuit boards on a Slot cover bracket.  The circuit boards cost about $10, and the price of the CF card is based on the size, w/ 4GB cards costing about $15 each on FleaBay on April 2021 (for used, Industrial rated, name brand cards).  This give a total installed cost of $25.  Depending on the Compact Flash card itself, these can be capable of quite fast transfer rates, with the proper CF card, your computer should be limited by the speed of the IDE interface in the machine.  Here's a picture of my 486 build showing the CF card bracket on the back...

For IDE based Laptops, these CF to 2.5" 44 pin IDE drive adapters cost just a bit more on Amazon, these were about $18 delivered putting the total cost for a 4GB drive solution at about $33.  Again speed is dependent on the CF card itself,  I have one of these in a PowerBook 3400c and that's worked well.

Here's a cheaper solution that I will mention with a caveat.  There is an SD to IDE solution sold on Amazon, but I have tried this solution in several different computers and it's hit or miss.  Sometimes they work and in some computers they just don't work at all.  The price is $16 plus the cost of an SD card.  As you will see in the detail they are quite slow, limited to 25 MB/s transfer rates. The limited compatibility and speed is a disappointment because as CF cards become less available and more expensive this could become the cheapest option on the list.  It's already close to the least expensive at $26 in 2021.

I recently learned about another option from Sean at Action Retro.  He's been recommending and using some low-cost mSATA to IDE drive adapters and lost cost mSATA SSDs from China that work well, are brand new, and have significantly greater storage than the options I've mentioned here.  Here's a link to a drive enclosure, I can't vouch for this seller yet, but there are many like this on Fleabay.  Here's a link too the SSD drive itself.  Note that you have to be careful to match the keying, physical length, and the communication standards for the drive and enclosure, as the enclosure will not work with PCIe based cards.  After I figured this out I was able to upgrade my Pismo with this...

The drive is the white plastic enclosure on the right, not very visually interesting, but this solution cost about $31 for both parts of a 64 GB drive so this is far and away the lowest cost per Gigabyte of the storage options and still in the middle of the pack for overall cost and at the top in terms of speed.  This will be my go-to for "bridge" systems that will see use for disk imaging or backups.

In summary, the CF card solutions still seems like the best solution for now for the older machines given the relatively high speed and lower price but for newer machines the mSATA SSDs will be my go-to solution.  Thanks again to Sean at Action Retro for highlighting this option on his YouTube channel!

Do you have any experience with Flash based storage solutions for older Macintosh or PC based machines?  What low-cost solutions would you add to this list?  Comment below, or feel free to send me an email.