CFFA3000

The CFFA3000 was a great leap forward for storage devices over the previous CFFA card designs, and pretty much everything else that came before it.

You could now store disk images of any size on a compact flash card OR USB stick connected to the card, and mount them either on the Smart Port (on a IIGS, that allows you to have at least 15 large volume drives accessible at once, each of them hot swappable) or on Slot 6, where the 5.25" disk floppy drive resides, meaning you can run virtually all classic 8-bit software that originally came on the format without needing the disk drive or physical disks. Disk images can be mounted on the Smart Port or Disk II via the card's built in menu system that can be accessed holding down the 'M' key or by the IIGS's classic control panel by holding down open-apple, control and escape. By using disk images, you can use a PC or Mac to copy over each program effortlessly via virtual disk images. You can still format a compact flash card like you could with previous CFFA cards, but the mounting of disk images from the storage device allows you load different programs so much more quicker and get around the inherent limits of ProDOS and DOS 3.3 formats.

I've been meaning to write a comprehensive review of the CFFA3000 card (because quite a few people still don't appreciate how good it is versus every other storage method on the Apple II) but I have too much fun using the card rather than writing about it.

At time of writing, developer Rich Dreher is planning to sell another production run of the card in November 2015. Buy one...you won't regret it.