It seems every week we see new products aimed at bringing vintage computers back to life, and the XTSSD ISA 8-bit SSD Adapter falls squarely into that category. With vintage PCs from the 1980s approaching 40 years old, we see fewer hard drives that are in good working condition. While there have been other approaches, such as using SD cards or CompactFlash, these have limitations when used as the storage medium for a computer. They don’t have great write endurance, and their random access speeds are quite low compared even to mechanical hard drives.
This well-designed and very clean board takes any mSATA SSDs and adapts them for use with the ISA bus. By converting the mSATA interface to IDE using an off-the-shelf module, the board then has the code and interface circuitry to add IDE devices to the ISA bus. This will make your old computer whisper-quiet, which for some people is a must — but others prefer the sound of a mechanical hard drive whirring away. That’s okay — you can use this board directly with IDE drives too! Note that only one interface or the other can be in use at once, so unfortunately you can’t have both an mSATA SSD and an IDE drive with a single board.
If you’ve been looking for a solution to upgrade your old machines, take a good look at the XTSSD! Not only is it faster, but better write endurance on SSDs mean a long and reliable life inside your vintage computer, keeping it running for another generation!
