Spyke
lemmy.world

I still remember the "master" and "slave" settings on HDD's.

The "master" drive is the primary device, and the "slave" is the secondary. The configuration was set via jumpers on the hard drive or by using a "cable select" cable.

Having two HDD's installed in my PC felt like a achievement at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yakPdbD86g

25
adarzareply
lemmy.ca

i don't remember how much i paid for my first 8+ gb hdd in the 1990s, but it was probably $200 or more.. for what now fits on a $5 flash drive.

4

I remember paying 80 bucks to go from 4 to 6mb of ram. windows 3.1 load time so much better

1
lemmy.world

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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x4740Nreply
lemmy.world

I swear I saw this movie from the gif on TV once but I can't remember the name and only remember a small section of it

1

Saving Private Ryan, a gloves-off war movie about bringing this guy home on the last surviving kin rule. Had a lot of star actors in it.

1
lemmy.world

IDE hard disk connection, pre-SATA.

you might be able to find an adapter somewhere.

32

Today I ordered some chicken nuggets from mcdonalds and asked for hot mustard sauce. the kid at register had no clue what that was and gave me some sort of chipotle sauce. we are, indeed, getting old.

6
lemmy.world

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

24

You could use it for one, if you had an adapter. I wouldn't though. It'll almost certainly limit performance.

8
[deleted]reply
piefed.world

There where and apparently still are SSDs that use PATA connections. One of my first SSDs did because I put it in fairly old hardware at that time.

I can't imagine the drive has more than double digit GB though.

5

Nah it depends on the region I guess. I'm a few years under that and I worked with IDE cables many times as a kid

1
lemmy.world

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.

15
Treczoksreply
lemmy.world

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.

1
lemmy.sdf.org

This functionality was implemented with a single cable select wire which is connected or open. I don't see how a twist would work electrically.

1

Yes, there is definitely the "cable select" method with pin 28. Maybe instead of cutting it, they swapped it with a GND pin or something?

1

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...

5

Im old enough to know how to do that too. My comment was clearly ment to be humorous.

It was one of those I feel old moments nothing moee

2

It's not always what Gen are you, it's more like your knowledge and profession.

3
mlg
lemmy.world

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

8

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.

4
Scrubblesreply
poptalk.scrubbles.tech

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

1

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.

1

There's no way I could remember a model number or brand. I worked Geek Squad back then and replaced probably thousands of laptop hard drives. Number one point of failure

2

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.

5

My first SSD had PATA(IDE) connnection. It was tiny, but stilll faster than my 7200 rpm HDD for gaming at the time.

There are SSD drives still being sold with IDE(PATA) connections! Expensive for what they are. Probably replacements for older vending machines or other electronic things that last decades.

https://www.amazon.com/pata-ssd/s?k=pata+ssd

2

Actually there are, I thought the same thing, but you can now get an SSD with an IDE interface. I think it's a recent thing, but I seem to at least remember something like a compact flash to ide once upon a time

1
feddit.org

Btw I recently learned that there were more protocols that used this cable than just IDE / PATA, there were some proprietary optical drives that used this cabling but could be damaged if connected to an IDE port. Was from a YouTube video and can't access history right now but long story short you had to use a port on your soundcard that had the same physical pin layout but was different electrically.

3

Yes there was a window of time where it was common that a CD-ROM drive was sold with a sound card and they would connect using the same type of ribbon cable. I worked for an OEM PC assembly company and installed many of those.

2

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.

3