This is very exciting! One of the latest developments for the BBC micro is the Compact Flash Hard Drive, made by Retroclinic. It connects to the 1MHz Bus, like any other hard drive, and uses an IDE interface to communicate with flash memory cards, in this case Compact Flash cards.

I bought this at Byte-Back, although I wasn't intending to originally. I have always taken the view that I would rather keep the old hardware going than replace it with modern hardware, so I have thus far avoided buying any of the various mass-storage devices which have come out for the Beeb over the last few years.

However, I was so impressed with the Compact Flash Drive (which comes in internal and external varieties, by the way) at Byte-Back that I took the plunge and bought my very own!

The good thing about it is that it appears to the Beeb like any other Winchester drive: you talk to it using ADFS so all the familiar commands and file structure are available. It isn't like some of the new-fangled memory drives which have to be fitted internally and require their own special software to run, you just plug it in and use ADFS like you would if it was a 20MB Rodime!

What really persuaded me to get one was that it could be used with the Level 3 Econet file server! Imagine how much space you could get with one of these drives!

I took these pictures just after coming back from Byte-Back, although it was a couple of weeks until I actually tried out the drive, partly because I was saving it for a special occasion, and partly because I didn't have any Compact Flash cards at the time. I've now had a good play around with the drive, so please come back here shortly to learn more. In the meantime, please click on the picture links above to learn more.