How are those CompactFlash -> IDE adapters?

[Freezer7Pro]

I'm going to set up a couple of folding rigs soon, but due to the nature of this house, I have to set them up in my room/bedroom, which calls for silent computers. Now, I have quiet fans, and the hardware will be some a bit older things, so I can get cooling very quiet and run at high temps, but the only spare hard drives I have, are loud things from the early 2000s. CF->IDE adapters are around 10€ here, and a Class II 4GB CF card is 15. Do they work good and reliably? Are there any special things I should look for?

 

[Madwand]

I sourced some which were advertised as "DMA capable" off eBay, and have used them with UDMA-capable (e.g. A-Data Turbo 266x) and non-UDMA-capable (e.g. A-Data Speedy) cards. There's often a big difference in the resultant performance, although the performance of the inexpensive non-DMA cards has been improving. Once you're past the initial installation, for a background machine, the performance is not very important, and the price difference between UDMA-capable and non-UDMA capable cards is still pretty high, so it is reasonable to go with the cheaper cards at this time.

The only issue I've encountered was file system corruption when run under Windows 2000 with write caching enabled (especially seen after patch / service pack installation & rebooting). I didn't see this in another case with another adapter running XP, but it's better to be informed and safe -- until you're sure it's working fine, I suggest keeping write caching off and/or keeping full backups.

 

[Moto7451]

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.711

Hard to beat that price.