If you have spare SD cards lying around your house, why not employ them for something useful? This SD to IDE adapter allows your PC to recognize SD cards as though they were a hard drive. Since this works at the BIOS level, you can even boot directly from SD. Wouldn't it be more convenient to update your Linux Live CD o­n an SD card instead of having to rewrite a CD over and over again?

Two models of SD card to 44-pin IDE conversion adapter have been released by ircube, and both allow the system to be booted from the inserted media. The price of the "IR-SDIDE02S" with o­ne card slot is 6,980 yen ~ 7,000 yen, and the price of the "IR-SDIDE02D" with two card slots is 8,800 yen ~ 9,000 yen (please see "New Products Found This Week" for details).

When speaking about memory card to IDE conversion adapters, CF card would be the most popular; this is the first confirmed offering of such a conversion adapter for SD cards. This product has the same naked substrate with media slot and IDE connector style as the CF card versions do.

SD cards inserted in the slot are recognized by the PC as hard drives. The "IR-SDIDE02S" can be changed between slave and master using the DIP switch. o­n the "IR-SDIDE02D," o­ne SD card is the slave, and the other the master. The IDE connector is the same as a 2.5" hard drive; it has 44 pins.

The largest merit of this product is its ability to sustain a transfer rate of 20MB/sec with ultra-high speed SD cards; for users who want to make a "diskless" PC using o­nly memory cards, you could say this product fits that particular need quite well. We were able to confirm that o­n top of the substrate is the "CG200" host controller made by C-Guys, which states a 20MB/sec maximum efficiency throughput.

Furthermore, PC SHOP Wakamatsu has said that "according to the maker, there may be compatibility issues with certain motherboards." Details regarding which particular motherboard models are affected are unknown.



Inspired by:
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotline/20050312/etc_irsdide.html

Product Information:
http://www.ircube.jp/main/product/sdide/

CG200:
http://www.c-guys.jp/CG200_index_jp.htm