Re: cf card to ide adaptor will it work via vulcan controller?

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Mark McDougall wrote:
> mr. brad wrote:
>
>
> > anyway....the link is below it is like 99c for one and like around $6 to 
> > ship it..but what i was wondering is...could this be used on the end of a 
> > vulcan internal card for the // line with a standard ide cable..i have a 
> > vulcan card but no
> > hd with it...i think? gse-reactive.com has an adaptor that does the same..
>
>
> The adapter itself is little more that a wiring harness (with a few
> power-conditioning caps). CompactFlash cards operate in "TrueIDE" mode
> by default on power-up, which means they operate exactly as IDE drives
> would. So you should be able to use them to replace *any* IDE hard drive.
>
> I can't speak for your specific application as I know nothing about the
> vulcan - though if it uses an IDE drive 'nicely' I wouldn't think you
> should have any problems.
>
> The GSE adapter is both controller and CF adaptor in one, in effect
> replacing the vulcan plus hard drive.

The Vulcan was a considerable hack.  It uses the IDE drive in a way
that was tested to work with the drives they shipped, but it was
neither designed nor tested to work with arbitrary IDE drives.

Put another way, it seems to have been designed by changing things
until the test setup worked, rather than designing to the IDE spec.

-michael

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