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What are people's opinions on them? Do people like them? Or are they dead in the era of cheap SSDs?
they were dead 10 years ago. I keep a couple on hand just in case someone comes in with some ancient machine critical machine - hasn't happened yet
The only disadvantage I can see to them, other than when the bios is getting funny about master/slave/cable select jumper settings is the IDE cables never seem to be long enough to reach to where you want to put your drive, and also motherboards only usually seem to support four IDE devices; there usually is only two IDE ports on the motherboards.
Found this online , only briefly looked at it but i think it shows when and why Smile

https://www.diffen.com/difference/IDE_vs_SATA
IDE was dead a long time ago. I've not seen a motherboard for at least 10 years with an IDE connector.
I'm just working on a old P4 system at the moment. It is extra good as it has IDE and SATA so you can have a lot of drives connected at once.

I've been trying to extract data from a faulty drive, but it is a bit flakey and the BIOS doesn't notice it all the time. I might have to give it a rest and try it later.

I also have an ancient 40 GB I'm trying to install Win Me on also, but I think it needs to be preformatted in MS DOS format first as it doesn't like it.
Ive got better drives than IDE.
Ive got RLL! Big Grin
IDE ? ............Sloooowwwwww......PASS.
(22-11-2021, 06:22 AM)Me+Me Wrote: [ -> ]IDE ? ............Sloooowwwwww......PASS.

That may be so, but sometimes one is limited by the motherboard.
I remember making my own SSDs using compact flash to IDE adapters!
What is quite funny as that there were some minature hard drives made in the compactflash form factor which were 100% compatible.

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

You could use on of those perhaps?
(22-11-2021, 02:20 PM)TygerTung Wrote: [ -> ]What is quite funny as that there were some minature hard drives made in the compactflash form factor which were 100% compatible.

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

You could use on of those perhaps?
Those things were extremely unreliable from what I remember, they didnt seem to last rather long as solid state memory made significant advances.
Well, they are a pretty small form factor to try and fit a whole hard drive in. Although it seems the iPod mini used them. So maybe can pull apart an iPod and get the microdrive out, and replace it with a CF card and then you could put the microdrive into a desktop PC.
Clearly IDE is phased out now. Not supported but no doubt you can get an adapter for them. As has been said, the cables were often too short. And restricted air flow being a wide ribbon cable. I have a heap of IDE drives I wanna back up and discard some time.
(04-12-2021, 04:42 AM)kiwi Wrote: [ -> ]Clearly IDE is phased out now. Not supported but no doubt you can get an adapter for them. As has been said, the cables were often too short. And restricted air flow being a wide ribbon cable. I have a heap of IDE drives I wanna back up and discard some time.
I might be interested in a few of them if they are around 4-500mb or so for my old DOS machines