An antique IDE hard drive from more than 20 years ago was successfully resurrected by connecting to USB 3.1

Today’s mechanical hard disk interfaces are all SATA, but do you know what they were before it?IDE's full name is Integrated Drive Electronics (Integrated Drive Electronics), also called PATA (Parallel ATA). It is a long plastic interface. The corresponding data cable is a 40-pin cable, matched with a large four-pin power supply interface and power cord, and supports master-slave lines.

It uses a parallel transmission mode, and the speed was less than 10MB/s in the early stage, and the highest in the later period was only 133MB/s.

The IDE interface was very popular around 2000, and was used in hard disks and optical drives. However, it was eventually replaced by SATA due to its shortcomings such as line width, slow speed, poor anti-interference, and lack of support for hot swapping.

If you still have an old IDE hard drive and want to back up your data or go retro, the biggest problem is how to connect it to today's computers.

JJ Dasher from JJ's Messy Bench specially created "ATAboy", an open source adapter specifically for old IDE hard drives that can be converted into a USB interface.

The ATAboy circuit board usesRaspberry Pi RP2350 SoC system on chip, that is, the same chip as the Raspberry Pi Pico 2/2W (250MHz Arm dual core), which realizes the transfer between IDE and USB through GPIO.

The PCB was designed using the popular open source CAD software KiCad.

How to use it is simple:

Use ATAboy to connect the IDE hard drive, connect the external power supply, plug the USB-C interface into the computer, and open the serial terminal (such as PuTTY).

At this time,You can see the highly restored Award-style BIOS menu, which is simple, clean and full of nostalgia.

Here you can automatically detect the hard disk parameters or fill them in manually. After completion, the system will recognize it asUSB mass storage device.Done!

ATAboy compatibleCHS, LBAThere are two hard disk addressing methods, but I prefer the older CHS, and it is recommended to run in PIO Mode 0.

The system supports Windows, Linux, and macOS, and the interface currently only supportsUSB 3.1, but it's enough for an IDE.

ATAboy already has finished products for sale, price$50,Also availableSchematic diagram, latest firmware, BOM list of materials, 3D printed shell, etc.Download the file for use.