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Finland, Helsinki
1 Level
697 Review
34 Karma

Review on Optimal Shop Digital Adapter Converter by Joe Comforti

Revainrating 1 out of 5

Works great with 32GB SDHC card with Fujitsu ST5032D

I ordered this adapter and two different SD to IDE converters for older laptops to see which ones 3 I would prefer and this is the only one that worked with a 32GB Sony SDHC Class 10 card in a Fujitsu ST5032D. Because it was the only thing that worked in it, I haven't tried it in anything else, it worked, so it stayed. Copied a previous installation of Windows from a failed hard drive to a 32GB SDHC card connected to another adapter using 2 USB IDE laptop adapters and Mini Tool Drive Copy. With the original adapter I used to copy over Windows, it didn't recognize the SD card in the BIOS, so it couldn't boot. As soon as I replaced that adapter with this one, it booted with no action in the BIOS. The only problem is figuring out which pin needs to be cut off (if required for your device, mine had a pin blocked on the connector) but pin 1 is clearly marked and after that it just takes a little googling to figure out which pin must be cut off (be careful not to cut off the wrong pin). How I removed the pin was easy, I used a small straw from a compressed air can to bend the pin back and forth and it broke perfectly at the plastic base. I'm very impressed with how fast this thing actually loads from this card. I didn't expect it to be very fast, but it's faster than an old hard drive. (even before it started to fail) The reason I chose the SD card to IDE converter over the compact flash to IDE converter is the price difference between a 32GB SD card and a 32GB compact flash card. The delivery was quite fast, arrived much earlier than expected. Very impressed with this little adapter and I plan to order more in the future just in case. Been working on this thing for about a month, no problems yet. Please note that SD cards are not like a real SSD, they have a very limited number of read/write cycles. This isn't a problem for our laptops as we don't do things like video/audio editing or anything that requires a lot of read/write operations. This adapter has LEDs on one side, but they are still not visible in the laptop. Also, make sure that the SD card's write-protect switch is not turned on.

Pros
  • Best in niche
Cons
  • Not as thick as other options