Note: This product can have some shipping delays if it is under heavy demand or an inrush of orders occurs.The XT-IDE Deluxe is primarily for adding a reliable, modern hard disk solution to an 8088 PC, such as an IBM 5150 or 5160. It also works in 286 and up, but the
Monotech DoubleROM card will provide you better performance in those.
The card provides both a rear-accessible CompactFlash card slot, and an internal IDE port for hard drives or internal CF cards. You can use both at once, with a maximum of two drives total.
This rear-accessible slot allows easy swapping of cards, or transfer between vintage PC and modern PC.
Typical uses:
- Add IDE HDD or CF card to an 8-bit ISA system such as IBM PC, XT, and clones.
- Add IDE support to a system without IDE support in the BIOS (like AT and ISA PS/2).
By default the XT-IDE BIOS comes configured for:
- All-CPU-compatible BIOS.
- Use the XT-IDE Card's IDE interface at 300h, no IRQ needed.
- Boot first hard drive unless user presses A for floppy.
Any of the above can be changed on purchase, or in your own time with the simple DOS utility.
I recommend using the 186 BIOS if you have an 80186 or NEC V20/V30 or higher, for improved disk performance.
Switches and jumpers control:
- Whether the CF card slot is Master (Drive 0) or Slave (Drive 1).
- I/O port for the onboard 8-bit IDE interface
- Memory port for the Option ROM
- Option ROM Enable
- Option ROM Write-protect
- ROM type
- Compatibility mode ("XT-IDE Rev1") and HiSpeed mode ("XT-IDE Rev2")
- Provide 5V on IDE pin 20, which can power some DoMs and CF adapters.
- IBM XT Slot-8 Support
There are blank PCB pads for an optional power output connector. Useful for powering an IDE HDD in machines such as the PS/2 Model 30, which doesn't have a spare power connector from the power supply.
You can upgrade to the 16K+ ROM. This has a boot menu and is only useful if you wish to
boot from more than one HDD and Floppy drive at different times. The default 8K ROM allows
booting from one HDD and one floppy drive (by pressing A), but still allows using other drives.
The CF slot is set to master by default, as some CF cards don't like being slave. You can change this with a jumper on the CF daughterboard.
Max 2 drives, one as master, one as slave.
So you could have one IDE drive on an IDE cable, and the rear-accessible CF slot populated.
Or you can have just the CF slot populated, or up to two IDE drives on an IDE cable, with no CF card in the slot.
XT-IDE Universal BIOS Firmware and config utilityXT-IDE Universal BIOS SourceXT-IDE Deluxe PCB SourceNote: If you choose to bundle a 64M card, and they are not in stock, a 128M card may be provided instead.
Note: The 4th photo shows a Monotech MicroRAM card attached. This is not included, and can be purchased separately here. Attaching it to the XT-IDE card instead of installing it into an ISA slot, simply saves you an ISA slot.
Note: The ROM chip model in the photo is just an example. The actual chip provided may be different, and will depend on my stock, and the BIOS size you have selected. If the 8K ROMs are out of stock, you may be upgraded to the larger ROM free of charge.
Note: All orders after 6th Sep 2021, ship with XT-IDE Universal BIOS R618. Before this, R602 was used, which had a small bug relating to LBA addressing. In the process of fixing this bug in R606, CF cards formatted on an older XUB version than R606 won't boot, and will need reformatting (and vice versa for cards formatted within R606+ XT-IDE BIOS and trying to boot on <R606). Consider upgrading your XUB version on older XT-IDE cards if you wish to swap CF cards between machines.