SD Card Adapter for LPT

I've just received the SD Card adapter made by Eleco Kits, which can be bought on ebay. Lets test it!

The SDLPT adapter is designed to allow classic IBM Compatible PC Systems to use SD Cards as a disk file storage device. The adapter is an alternative option to floppy discs and is not designed as a direct replacement for hard drives or other storage devices.

The driver uses slow SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) connection trough the LPT port to communicate with the SD-Card and this limits the data transfer rate. Typical file transfer rate is comparable to a floppy disk drive at around 30-60kB/s. Transfer rates also depend on the PC System configuration and LPT port settings.

NOTE: Some systems may require the LPT port set for standard mode (Not ECP/EPP) from within the BIOS for correct operation.

• IBM PC Compatible computer with LPT port.
• SDLPT Adapter.
• SD Card 2GB or lower, the SDHC cards may work but are not supported.
• MiniUSB Power Adapter 5v 30mA.
• Drivers which can be downloaded here.

Better to use standard SD Card 2gb or below, format it with command:

sudo diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk3 MBR "MS-DOS FAT16" "DATA" 0B

But if you have higher capacity sdhc or compatible card you can issue this command:

sudo diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk3 MBR "MS-DOS FAT16" "DATA" 2G "MS-DOS FAT16" "OTHER" 0B

This will create two partitions, one with label “DATA” will be usable in our situation, the other will not be used at all, because driver only sees first partition on the sd card by default. There are options to mount more partition, but it requires more driver instances to be loaded at the same time.

Downloaded drivers and put sd.sys to C:\sd\, then edit C:\config.sys to add this line:

DEVICE=C:\sd\sd.sys

Save the file and turn the computer off.

Make sure that jumper are on 2-3 switch for drivers to work, connect power source and connect it to the computer. Switch the computer on.

It works! In the short testing i was unable to make sddrv.sys or sdeuro.sys to work when setting jumper to 1-2 mode. It always failed to initialize the device or computer just hanged, tried with different LPT port configurations without success. Maybe there was an problem with my computer hardware and not the adapter, i will further test it on other systems as well. sd.sys worked ok for me, it sees the sd card (i've used 4gb SDHC card with two 2GB partitions), the speeds are terrible slow, i think it's like floppy or even slower, on different lpt configuration and modes the speed was the same. The thing is good but not great when talking about speeds, the portability is also limited, when you need to connected external power source to the adapter, in my opinion this must be improved by using 9V battery or so, speeds also can be improved using parallel transfer or some native interface, look at zip drive speeds, they are using the same lpt connection, but speeds are much more higher. The price is good, but the usability are not very great. This can be handy for systems that have absolutely no ability to use network or serial transfers, have no internal or external disk/floppy drivers cd-roms etc… It would be useful to transfer some bootstrap files to load some drivers, like network, cdrom, zip-drive and so on.