Pros: Works perfectly, includes an access LED which is handy. Includes master/slave jumper. Well packed. Brilliant price. Now serving as my primary boot drive.

Cons: IDE connector is on the top, so routing cables is slightly harder than if it were on the end like a regular hard disk. Needs a floppy drive power connector which are getting hard to find in modern systems. Non-standard mountings, so fitting into a case is a bit tricky. Mine is stuffed in the bubblewrap bag it came in then shoved in a spare drive bay!

Other Thoughts: There is lots of incorrect information online and in other reviews which I will try to correct. First, ALL these devices are passive - Compact Flash is designed to adhere to the ATA IDE standard and all these do is convert the CF connector to a normal IDE connector. There is no processing and performance of this versus any other adapter will be IDENTICAL. Speeds are down to the card and the system setup - ignore the earlier reviewer who claimed to get 150mb/s from a 16mb card (it's meaningless to benchmark performance at ten times the capacity of the card!).
To make CF work on some motherboards as a bootable drive you need to make sure the card identifies itself as a fixed disk, not a removeable disk - most do not. There is a Sandisk utility called "atcfwchg" (Google it) which lets you configure this option on Sandisk cards.
For decent performance you must use a fast card - I get excellent read and write speeds from a 4gb Sandisk Extreme III (>30mb/s). Finally, some cards mis-identify their PIO and UDMA capabilities. Mine would not reliably read with BIOS autodetecting, I had to manually try different combinations until I found that UDMA3 was the fastest it would cope with.

Bottomline: Excellent adapter. Be very wary of all the incorrect information about using these adapters - read up properly and use a good quality CF card. Ensure the card can be set to fixed disk mode and that it's at least 133x speed. Be aware that CF cards have limited writes so take steps to minimise these (e.g. disable pagefile in Windows). Some of the IBM X40 forums online have excellent information on replacing hard drives with CF.

Pros: Very simple installation if you're used to working with computers
It was very fast when i tested it with a cheap 16MB CF card, I got speeds of over 150MB/s
Good for hot swapping operating systems in a test environment or for advanced electronics projects

Cons: I guess you'd have to be wary of writing to it too much so that the CF card doesn't get worn out, making read only uses the only good use.

Other Thoughts: It's worth it just to have lying around, and it fun to experiment with

Bottomline: If you have even the slightest want for something like this, buy it, the price is great and it works.

Pros: After trying in multiple situations, I have been able to get basic usage from the CF cards and microdrives (mini HDD with CF interface) I have sitting around. This indeed does work but not in all situations (read cons).

Cons: Besides the use of a floppy power connector (for which I had to rig my own adapter), I had issue getting this item to read the microdrives which were the main reason I got this in the first place.
- In an old B&W G3 Mac, the install disc did not detect the microdrive connected to this item attached to IDE0 (no other drives are connected).
- Using a USB>IDE cable to externally connect this to my computer, it reads CF cards but not microdrives)
Eventually, I took out the interface from an old HDD enclosure and connected that to this and it works with both CF and microdrives. After backing up data and reformatting, I'm going to try these in a couple of other uses.

Other Thoughts: Some of my cons were obviously dependent on the interfacing hardware and not a defect of this item as I did eventually get it to work. Still, it's worth noting that CF cards seem to be more compatible than microdrives (even though they are listed as compatible in the included instructions).

Bottomline: It took a while, but I confirmed that it works. Realize that it may be finnicky, and you'll probably end up utilizing this well.

Pros: Useful for creating solid-state Compact Flash hard drive. Works perfectly even on old computers which don't have fast USB ports, with old OS'es. As easy to install as a normal IDE drive. Supports DMA 33 mode which is more than enough for most flash cards. It is also smaller and cheaper than all other versions, but it is well built and works perfectly.

Cons: The only complaint is that it has no screw holes so it has to be glued somewhere.

Other Thoughts:

Bottomline: It's a great and quite hard to find item and it's sold here for peanuts. So if you need something like this buy it without doubts.