A compact car that runs on a coal boiler. A cell phone that only allows you to text via Morse code. And a modern, multi-terabyte 2.5-inch SSD that connects to a motherboard with an IDE interface. What do all these things have in common? They’re perfectly plausible technology combinations that you’d need to be a little crazy to actually build. But the last one is now a reality, at least a theoretical one.
For those of our readers who might not be able to buy their own alcohol yet: IDE stands for Integrated Drive Electronics. Also known as Parallel-ATA, it’s a 40-pin connector we used to connect hard drives and disc drives to motherboards before SATA (Serial-ATA) came along. If you were building or upgrading PCs from around 1990 to 2005, you know the wide, floppy ribbon of an IDE cable well: it made desktop case cable routing a headache.
Github user “DosDude1” (spotted by Tom’s Hardware) remembers IDE fondly. Or perhaps they don’t, and they’ve designed an IDE interface for a modern storage controller out of pure necessity. Either way, if you have a Silicon Motion SM2236 controller, a bunch of NAND flash storage modules, and a bit of soldering and programming skill, you can create your own 2.5-inch SSD that connects with an IDE-equipped motherboard.
The speed of your flash storage (up to 2 TB of it, if you max out the four 512GB connections) will vastly bottleneck the IDE connection, which tops out at 133 megabits per second. That’s about one-fifth the speed of a modern SATA III connection, which is also about the same difference between SATA III and a speedy NVMe M.2 drive (3.5 Gbps). But hey, if you absolutely need to run Red Alert II on period-accurate hardware, aside from insanely fast storage, here’s your chance.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer
Michael is a former graphic designer who's been building and tweaking desktop computers for longer than he cares to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no particular order.