icaBlog

If you read my blog (and why wouldn’t you?) you’ll know that I’ve had a few problems with my DivIDE board using CF cards of 64Mb and above. As a temporary solution I’ve been scouring eBay for 32Mb CF cards (and even some 48Mb ones, which work well). Well I got an email from LaesQ last night detailing what the actual problem is, so I thought I’d rip his email and copy it here:

Been looking into your CF card problem and now know exactly what’s going on. Prepare for a little more technical speak…

Ok.. The problem chips are of the HCT breed, which are supposed to be good for replacements of LS breed chips. But (and this is a BIG but), the HCT’s are more prone to noise.

Now this is fine for normal IDE devices. But CF cards are not terminated (if you’ve ever played with SCSI you should know about this). So what you have is kinda wandering signals. So as the LS handles noise better, it appears to help terminate the CF card.

The solution? Put another IDE device on your IDE cable which does have termination built in, eg. CDROM or HDD. Or replace your HCT’s with LS ones.

I’ve not tried out the solution yet, I only spotted the email late last night, but I’ll give it a go and let you all know how it works. One of the problems with putting another device onto the IDE is that the CF-IDE device I have provides both Master and Slave. Hmm, tricky. When Mikezt was over a couple weeks ago he had a couple nice “low-profile” CF-IDE devices to stick to his DivIDE, so maybe I’ll get a couple of those made up, then I can swap-n-change my devices at a whim. I’ll also get the LS chips from LaesQ when he’s got some in.

I’ll get it working. I will.