Looking for an IDE simulator

Correct. CF cards talk to a SATA controller, you just have to adjust the pinout. SD is a packet based storage device on a serial interconnect, minimally one lane wide but it can also be four lanes (and that's typically how you use it). Apparently it starts out in a SPI compatible mode, interesting. Also, SD requires a rather complex handshake at power up to get to the point where you can do I/O. One oddity I remember from a decade ago is that it has a high speed mode where the clock speed is doubled. That's not strange. What's strange is that when you do this, the device switches from clocking data on the rising edge to clocking on the falling edge, or the other way around, I don't remember which. Fortunately I wasn't the hardware designer who had to cope with all that strangeness. paul