What is better, to use a IDE floppy drive on an Amiga 1200 or a compact flash card?  Which is faster?  Which one is more reliable?  Is it worrth removing my hard drive and installing one of these instead?

Thanks.

Barney

I do have a cf-adapter and 1GB cf card working in A1200. Its a bit faster then a real 2.5" harddrive because of no spinup and nearly no seek time. It also spare heat, space and power consume.
On the other hand any flash memory is wearing-out by every write access. Using flash memory as a mass storage device, its durability will shrink against usage as generally storage in mp3/digicam/etc. devices.

Also the desired cf card MUST support the IDE standard! Most Sandisk and Kingston do. If this mode is not supported by the cf-firmware it will not work as an IDE drive insinde the Amiga.
Beside this some cf-card dont work correctly with the Amiga reset signal line. If so, the card will not be seen after exiting the kickstart boot-menu (early startup). A possible fix will be to cut line #1 on the cf-adapter pdb to cf-card.

You forgot the LS120, mate.

 1.44Mb drive and 120Mb floppies at the same time. Via IDE.

err it says ** IDE floppy drive **

iv not seen this type of drive on a A1200 IDE port..... iv seen SCSI floppy drive but not on amiga SCSI chain.

Yeah he did say IDE Floppy but then went on to mention replacing a HD with a flash card, so I assume the question was in that context.  If you only use your A1200 to play HD games and don't do a lot of writes then a newer flash card will last for years.  I was suggested a SANDISK Ultra II, 4 or 8GB as very compatible.  One is on its way here as I type.

BTW: I've had a cheapy compact flash card in my Digi camera since 2004. I estimate I've taken around 20,000 photos on it and it's still going strong.

Why not. It's not like the entire card is rewritten every time you change a cell.

On an Amiga, the only regular write you can't get rid of is the .backdrop file on every boot. Hardly close to the beating a swap file gets.

The CF card may well outlive the Amiga it's connected to.

All modern flash memory card do support internal wear-leaving. Even if only the first block (RDB) is rewritten over and over again, the flash memory will not be rewitten at the same cells. The internal logic will transparent-rotate and only write to "the oldest" flash cell.
So the bigger the flash memory is, the expected live-time will grow by the same amount of write access.

I can test an LS-120 IDE floppy drive to work in the Amiga1200. Could take some time until then.