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

    Oof, my back...

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

    This is IDE or PATA

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA

    You can find IDE to SATA adapters online.

    Edit: just realized how old I am now :(

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

    IDE Cable. The end with two of these plugs goes to the drive, the end with one plug goes to the mobo. If it's a two-plug cable, it don't matter.

    Get an IDE to SATA adapter or IDE to USB adapter to connect this drive.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    IDE hard disk connection, pre-SATA.

    you might be able to find an adapter somewhere.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Good god, please tell me this is a troll post.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    IDE or Parallel ATA. Its ancient tech at this point. I doubt it goes to a SSD more likely a HDD.

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

    For those who know: remember to book your prostate exam

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago*

    I think the technical name for that connector is "nostalgia".

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

    Should also see the IDE slave/master jumper on the drive itself.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    So like... What does the jumper do?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    Many IDE cables used to come with 2-4+ daisy chained connectors allowing you to plug in multiple drives into a single cable on a single IDE bus.

    This meant that you had to ensure any downstream HDDs would be configured as slaves to show up properly to the system.

    You could either do this manually by setting the jumper to slave (usually just removing it) or setting the jumper to cable select which would automatically configure master slave drives for you.

    Example for a Seagate drive:

    In your case, you could either use the master select or cable select and it wouldn't matter since you only have one drive.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I'm gen z and even I know this is IDE

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

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/IDE-SATA-Converter/s?k=IDE+to+SATA+Converter

    Something like this is probably what your after

    Also I hate that we now live in a world where people dont know what an ide cable is 🤣

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Kids these days, they don't even know how to change the ribbon in a typewriter.

    What, so you're telling me that's "silly" because it's no longer relevant? Well, about that...

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

    You found an SSD that uses that cable? IDE SSDs exist, but they’re mostly modern devices for old systems.

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

    Laptops for a while had these on the 2.5 inchers, and then I remember a very small window of time having IDE 2.5 inch ssds, but it was a very narrow window

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    What laptops do you remember with a 2.5" IDE ssd? Microdrive hard drives were more popular in laptops than their CF counterparts just because SSDs were so slow and low capacity. SSDs didn't take off until right before NVME era.

    Disk on modules existed, but those were for industrial PCs and nothing a normal person would ever actually use.

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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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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Thats an IDE connector, i think. Old conection for drives. AFAIK there are no SSDs that use IDE so its probably using a SATA to IDE adapter so you could just take it out and conect directly to SATA.

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  • I have a USB cable with that and the laptop variant on the end. Works really well. Hard drives from 20-30 years ago show up on my MacBook as easy as flash drives. But very slow. As expected for those drives.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    IDE was a step up from SCSI bs

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