Review on GODSHARK SD Card to 2.5 Inch IDE Adapter - Convert SDHC SDXC MMC Memory Cards to Laptop HDD with 44 Pin Male PATA Port by John Frazier

There's no doubt about that. This adapter is real garbage. I had an absolutely miserable time with it and spent the whole day and then evening relentlessly trying every avenue I could think of to get this to work, but to no avail in the end. Sound like a horrible experience? It was! Ready to see my anger about this? Then let's continue! I couldn't get this thing to work with all the turkeys in Turkey. I needed it as a replacement hard drive for a 14 year old laptop that I had attached as a controller for my file server. There is an SD card reader, but the BIOS doesn't allow booting from SD. It can still boot from USB, and since it's so old they probably thought it was pretty modern back then, so I guess I'll ditch it. We continue. Guess which modern operating system is best for running a laptop over 14 years old and keep in mind that laptop specs were never impressive for their time, so they won't be particularly impressive now. If you guessed anything other than Linux, then you are wrong. But look on the bright side: the developers of this adapter made a mistake too. Now I know what the smarter ones think of you; "But wait. Linux is just an operating system. What does that have to do with the adapter? Is it proprietary? No, not from what I could tell. I used an IDE to USB adapter to test its functionality on linux and it works great. It works like any other storage device. So great. It's all good then, isn't it? Well, I took it and cloned the hard drive to an SD card. I plugged it in, let let it run and the computer behaved like nothing was plugged in. i unplugged it, plugged it back into the usb adapter, ran gparted and saw all the partitions were gone.didn't know what to make of it .I thought maybe I made a mistake by plugging it in maybe the wrong way around and that corrupted the SD card so I cloned the hard drive again I plugged it in ran it and the computer behaved like nothing was plugged in. I put it a Unplugged, plugged back into USB adapter, ran gparted and saw all partitions were gone. Great. Looks like we have a grade 4 self-replicating non-terminal spirit in the car, or a grade 5 vagrant vagrant. Also very evil. Buckle up boys! That's gonna be a long night! I then went around the house pulling different SD cards from different devices until I found the right arrangement of the different sizes. I also bought a brand new $30 128GB SD card specifically for this purpose. If you look at this page, you will see that the seller claims that this adapter supports SD cards up to 128GB. And I bet if you dig into this seller's past, you'll find even more lies. After many tests I can draw two conclusions: 1. The 128GB SD card works fine. 2. The maximum size supported by this SD card is 64GB. At least it's the biggest I've ever had, no more than 128GB. I didn't sell that last paragraph well enough. You have no idea how much time and effort went into what I just summarized. In fact, I don't think I can properly describe any of it to reflect how debilitating it was. I had to carefully go through the cloning process step by step until I could determine the exact step that leads to the SD card becoming unreadable. I only cloned the hard drive using SD card readers to eliminate the possibility of using this adapter when cloning. I've cloned with all sizes of SD cards to get rid of any kind of unevenness in SD card size. I cloned on different machines to rule out bugs in distribution or gparted versions. Everything in the cloning process itself resulted in the same results every time. So the cloning process itself was ruled out. Big! Right? Actually no, it's not very good because we're still where we were a few hours ago. I still have an SD card that I can't boot from. So I had to get creative. I had to think about all the basic aspects of data storage that I took for granted. What do I expect from a data warehouse that others might not expect. I still had a few test hours ahead of me. Then I discovered something. There is not one garbage here, but several. I knew there would be one, I expected it, but more than one? That explains why it was so difficult to determine where the garbage was. It was because I deal with more than one and they work together! I may have encountered a whole bunch of shit! Activate the proton chargers, boys! We're getting hot! After an incredible amount of testing, I've found that if you have more than exactly 1 partition on your SD card, this adapter won't know what to do with itself and will refuse to read the card. Okay, now that I know that, I can still boot from it, right? I just put the root directory on the adapter's SD card, then I put the home and swap partitions on a separate SD card in the reader. I can't boot from the reader, but I can still use it to mount and share home. The problem is solved! Except that the problem is not solved! I plugged it in, configured and updated GRUB, then rebooted. Again, the computer behaved as if nothing was connected. I unplugged it, plugged it back into the USB adapter, ran gparted and saw all the partitions were gone. Unbelievable! I thought I had this junk! nope I found another bug. The adapter has a problem with GRUB. If you install GRUB on an SD card, this adapter doesn't know what to do with itself and refuses to read the card. Well, that's all then. The game is over. If an adapter has problems with GRUB, then it probably has problems with all bootloaders, right? May be? I searched for LILO because I remember it was comparable to GRUB, so it might work instead! Except that LILO was discontinued in 2015. What about Syslinux? No, the last stable version was 2014. Maybe Loadlin then? No, he died in 2012. BURG? BURG is based on GRUB, so probably has the same problem. But what if the problem is with the modified MBR? Can't we just install GRUB on a USB device and then boot Linux from the adapter? Well, of course we could. But if we do that, we could just boot Linux with GRUB from an SD card reader. After all, we could then use a 128 GB SD card. So yeah, like I said, it's game over. Without the Linux bootloader, we're done with the adapter. How did we lose this fight? Well, I don't think that's the right question. The right question; What does a person need to defeat this adapter? I'll summarize it below. TL; DR: Should you get this adapter? Maybe if your needs are: 1. You won't be using a 128GB or larger SD card.2. You have exactly one partition on the SD card.3. You don't need GRUB or any other bootloader installed on the SD card. You won't be using Linux as you probably won't need this adapter at this point anyway as you can just install GRUB on a USB flash drive and then boot from any memory. If your requirements meet the above conditions. then this adapter might be suitable for you. If you expect this adapter to treat your SD card like any other storage device, then this adapter is not for you. It will not. In any situation, I would still expect more undiscovered crap. It deserves this one star rating.