This adapter has worked wonders in converting my old 386 and 486 computers over to solid state drives. a 4 gig CF card can be formated with maxblast software ddo so that the whole 4 gigs can be recognized. Much better solution than trying to find a 4 gig ide hard drive. I bought several of these to upgrade my old machines with.
The down side is that with SOME of the machines the master / slave isn't recognized properly. Sometimes you have to put the ide2cf on a different ide cable from the hard drive or cd-rom. But then you have to remember that machines of this vintage had personalities and even identical hardware would not perform exactly the same. All in all I'm very happy with it. It's allowed me to convert my old machines over to newer technology and keep them going. I highly recommend the ide2cf. One of the advantages this card has over other types is that it does plug into the ribbon cable so that you CAN have two devices on the same cable. That works most of the time. Only 1 out of 5 machines needed to have the ide2cf placed on a different cable from the cd-rom. I have gotten decent speed results with the sandisk 4gb 30mb/s cards. I'm very happy with this product and would recommend it to anyone.
One down side is the back of the card has exposed circuitry. I used silicon to glue a small piece of wood to the back, then glued the wood to the top of the floppy drive. This lets me change cf cards without opening the case. works great.