A compact automobile that runs on a coal boiler. A cellphone that solely means that you can textual content through Morse code. And a contemporary, multi-terabyte 2.5-inch SSD that connects to a motherboard with an IDE interface. What do all these items have in widespread? They’re completely believable know-how combos that you simply’d should be slightly loopy to truly construct. However the final one is now a actuality, at the very least a theoretical one.
For these of our readers who won’t have the ability to purchase their very own alcohol but: IDE stands for Built-in Drive Electronics. Also called Parallel-ATA, it’s a 40-pin connector we used to attach laborious drives and disc drives to motherboards earlier than SATA (Serial-ATA) got here alongside. When you have been constructing or upgrading PCs from round 1990 to 2005, you realize the huge, floppy ribbon of an IDE cable nicely: it made desktop case cable routing a headache.
Github person “DosDude1” (noticed by Tom’s {Hardware}) remembers IDE fondly. Or maybe they don’t, and so they’ve designed an IDE interface for a contemporary storage controller out of pure necessity. Both means, when you’ve got a Silicon Movement SM2236 controller, a bunch of NAND flash storage modules, and a little bit of soldering and programming talent, you possibly can create your personal 2.5-inch SSD that connects with an IDE-equipped motherboard.
The velocity of your flash storage (as much as 2 TB of it, for those who max out the 4 512GB connections) will vastly bottleneck the IDE connection, which tops out at 133 megabits per second. That’s about one-fifth the velocity of a contemporary SATA III connection, which can be about the identical distinction between SATA III and a speedy NVMe M.2 drive (3.5 Gbps). However hey, for those who completely have to run Crimson Alert II on period-accurate {hardware}, except for insanely quick storage, right here’s your probability.
