CompactFlash hard-drive?

[Cloudschatze]

What exactly is the point of the Molex connector?

Well, I have it plugged into the CF-IDE adapter.

Here is the 20MB monstrosity that the CF solution replaced, powered solely by the ISA bus:

[Laust]

Yikes. I would never have dared do that!

Maybe they pushed more power onto the ISA bus in the old days

[Cloudschatze]

I assume that the drive tables and hard drive BIOS extension are within the ROM on the 8-bit card, and the Molex connector was there in case the power supply did not have a spare, which is quite common in 80s machines.  I'm sure there is a way to build an adapter out of TTL chips.  Does a Tandy require a special BIOS chip?

I'm not sure if it contains drive tables or not. Upon boot-up, the card issues an IDENTIFY DRIVE command. This seems to work just fine for everything I tried under 504MB.

I'm also not sure what the differences between the Tandy and non-Tandy ROM might be. I've dumped the ROM contents (via Debug), if you ever want to take a look.

[Cloudschatze]

Saw this the other day:

Addonics Quad CF PCI Controller

A CompactFlash RAID array... How cool is that?! 

[BlueMax]

Very cool indeed!  It'd be fun to mod an old Pentium for silent running!