IDE adapters for the QL systems

There is a trend to replace hard disks with card media in retro computing in general and for QLs in particular. There are and have been a number of different interfaces for memory cards for QL systems. There was the Serial USBWiz device which worked as shown on this blog but the complexities of the serial systems across a range of QL platforms ultimately made this too complex to  manage in the long term. The new Q68 uses an SD card as its "hard drive". Small runs of SD card adapters for the microdrive slot on original QLs have also been produced. The QUBide IDE interface is still being produced. A clone version can be found on sellmyretro and the drivers for this have recently been updated. This IDE interface will connect to original black box QLs and to Aurora card QLs. The Qx0 systems have their own IDE controller board. So there are quite a few QL systems that have IDE hard disk interfaces.

IDE adapter boards for CF cards and SD cards can be found on Amazon and ebay but not all of these boards will work with QL IDE controllers. Two CF card adapters have already been mentioned in previous posts on this blog here and here.

Now 2 more adapters have been found to work with the Q60 here. First a CF card adapter with and without CF card. This one worked without fuss. There is a jumper to select master/slave and the power connector is underneath the board and is a floppy type connector.

An SD card adapter has also been assessed. Initially this adapter crashed the IDE controller. A bit of research on the web suggested that this controller which does not have a jumper for master/slave suggested it was configured to always be the master device. If fact this was not quite correct. This device is not only the master but must also be the sole device on the IDE controller. It is not possible to add a slave device. So if a single IDE device is all that is required this card actually works well on the Q60.