I have recently taken apart some old PCs and found an HDD that uses this cable, but my motherboard doesn't seem to have a connector. Is there a way to connect this to SATA or PCIE?

edit: hdd, not ssd

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[–] 15 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That is an IDE cable, the standard for consumer-grade drives before SATA came along.

Sometimes you can find such cables with three connectors, one at one end, two at the other. And sometimes, a few wires are flipped over between those two connectors.

One IDE cable could host two harddisks, and most IDE harddisks had jumpers to set them to be drive 0 or 1. With a straight cable, you had to jumper them properly, with the partially twisted cable, you set both identical, I.e. you left them both as device 0.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    The cable with the twist is a floppy drive cable, not IDE.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    You can twist the IDE cable to switch the M/S configuration, too. It is not limited to the Shugart bus. But I have to admit it was more common there.

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