KingSpec 16GB 40Pin Vertical IDE PATA DOM, 3D NAND TLC Industrial Disk On Module, Compatible with POS Machine/Industrial Computer/Medical Equipment

Used with a SFF motherboard to make a small foot print drive repair/backup station. This is holding all of the OS and software no problem. Boots plenty fast enough for Linux and Windows PXE.

I put two of these in two different computers. One was a Packard Bell from 1996, and the other on an Abit brand Motherboard from 1999. It worked in both. On the Abit board I had to use it with the ATA33 controller. The motherboard detected it fine in the ATA66 controller but the Windows 98 boot disk would hang. I’m not sure if that was an issue with this drive or with Windows 98 so that may be something to consider.As for other things. It’s not going to look like the picture in this listing it’ll probably have different branding. Also it includes the molex power cable which is not seen in the listing photos. I’ll probably be buying more of these as needed for old computers.

There's no real world configuration you can use with this so don't bother. I thought I could just plug this into my motherboard and it would be a solid state drive but no. There's also no viable adapter to use with this. Ended up sending it back.

Right now I'm in the middle of upgrading every single machine in this house to the joys of solid state, and that includes the vintage PATA fleet. Sadly KingSpec's "Yansen" lineup of PATA SSDs is not exactly a plug and play solution. Not without some research, which you WON'T find online!First, the good points:- No jumpers - just an "anonymous" switch that selects between Master and Slave (doesn't look like this DOM does Cable Select?). Can't really go wrong there - if the drive doesn't get detected, just flick the switch!- By far the most affordable PATA SSDs, even if the price/capacity ratio is awful compared to SATA/NVMe SSDs of the same size - this is a "boutique" product after all.- Intel MLC flash - not modern low-grade QLC garbage!- Read performance is good - up to 90MB/s on a UDMA100 port, not bad for PATA at all.The "meh" points:- Controller is a SiliconMotion SM2236AC, which is meant for CF cards. Not exactly the best choice for a proper PATA SSD, but it's basically the *only* native PATA SSD controller in production in the 2020s, it looks like.- No documentation AT ALL.- Write speeds are hardly impressive, as expected from old MLC.- The PATA connector is a tight fit, which means that DOM is not moving at all (but removing it might be difficult)And now, the ugly points:- The power cable is fragile. In one of my tests I had the 12V pins detaching from the Molex connector! Thankfully those are not used, but it means this drive is "plug once and hopefully don't touch it ever again".- No TRIM support on firmware. Believe it or not, TRIM works over PATA if the drive supports it and the host knows how to issue the command (tested on many SSDs using PATA to SATA bridgeboards). Most likely this is because of the CF card controller from SMI used on the SSD.- Other firmware features come disabled for no good reason at all. Need an HPA? (useful for preserving recovery partitions and other things like IBM's Predesktop Area) Sorry, can't do. The controller firmware SUPPORTS HPAs, but you have to get a copy of SMI's SM2236AC MPtools and reflash the drive firmware to enable the feature (and by reflashing the drive you WILL lose some capacity!). Of course doing that likely voids all and any warranty.- PATA connector is not internally wired to pretend it's a 80-conductor cable, which will hurt performance as the OS will detect it as a 40-pin cable, therefore limiting it to UDMA33. Workarounds include either forcing 80-conductor cable on drivers (it's a libata option in Linux), or plugging the drive to a male-to-male PATA coupler and a 80-pin cable.- Kingspec/Yansen support is non-existent. No documentation AT ALL, no tech specs, and the only end user support they offer is over email and a phone/Whatsapp in China! And of course they have changed specs without prior notice (including the rebranding of their entire PATA lineup to Yansen). This hurts me especially badly since I'm in Venezuela and shipping things back to Amazon is a non-starter.Compatibility tests:- IBM Thinkcentre M50 (Intel i865G/ICH5): works fine.- JMicron 2033x USB to SATA/PATA bridgechip: works fine.- Compaq Presario 5000LA (Intel i810E/ICH2): gets detected, but has problems booting from it (for example GRUB2 tries to read from non-existing sectors, or simply hangs at a black screen). This particular box seems to hate ANYTHING that isn't a pure PATA rust spinner, as it also experiences similar incompatibilities with SATA-to-PATA bridgeboards with both SSDs and HDDs.- PCChips M756LMR motherboard (SiS 630): Will hang the BIOS if autodetected - set it as "User, CHS 0/0/0", and let it go as a LBA-only drive. After that, it works fine, but performance is awfully slow (~20MB/s!)MUCH better experience than with the 2.5" Yansen SSDs, but still the poor support, lack of documentation, and possible compatibility issues with old machines makes it not a great investment. When it works, it works like a charm, tho. Just be aware that this is not a cheap impulse buy, but then PATA DOMs are getting more and more rare and insanely expensive, and not every box likes bridgechips.

I used carbon copy clone and formatted with partition map APS and HFS+ works great boots fast! And applications are running smooth. Quake 3 ran much better with this SSD compared to HDD. This was worth the upgrade and now my eMac is silent and smooth!

I used this to replace the standard 1GB IDE drive and loaded Ubuntu 16.04 onto it. Works great.

worked great. A must for someone trying to keep an old machine going

Works