Ide motherboard: remembering an old storage connection?

Before, the IDE standard existed on any motherboard. They were other times and IDE hard drives were in every home Do you remember the data buses?

Years ago, the standard was IDE hard drives that connected to the motherboard using a huge gray data bus. This connection was used for hard drives, players, recorders, or CD-ROM drives. It was part of the technology for a long time until the arrival of SATA connections , which was a revolution.

Today, we take a look at the IDE connector on the motherboard.

Index of contents

IDE ( Integrated Drive Electronics) interface

It was the interface used to connect our hard drives or CD / DVD recorders / players to our motherboard . Its main argument was that its performance was similar to that of the SCSI interface , but IDE was much cheaper and easier to install. It was the standard in data transfer in 2003.

When we hear or read ATA or PATA Interface , we are talking about IDE because they are technologies linked to each other. We would have to wait for Serial ATA (SATA) to talk about SATA hard drives. Before that, we will explain how the first interface worked.

ATA

Also known as PATA or P-ATA, it was an interface that was used to connect hard drives and optical drives. It was developed by Western Digital, Control Data and Compaq Computer. As for motherboards, the first to support this interface would be found on PCs from IBM, Dell or Commodore. To put us in context, we are in 1986.

Years later, motherboard manufacturers would start to incorporate this interface, but a problem arose: the appearance of the CD-ROM. While in SCSI there was the possibility of incorporating a CD-ROM expansion, in ATA it was not possible, if you had two hard drives installed.

As SCSI was much more expensive than ATA, the need arose to lower this possibility for consumers. So the most affordable option was to add a dedicated interface to the CD-ROM, which was installed as an expansion, like a graphics card.

We would have to wait until 1994 to see how Western Digital introduced EIDE (Enhanced IDE) devices. But, after several evolutions and improvements, we would see ATA-4 or Ultra DMA, interfaces that supported data transfer speeds of up to 33 megabytes per second. IDE and motherboard was the standard.

What characterized IDE connections?

Any motherboard that worked with IDE hard drives was characterized by two things: data bus or ribbon cable, molex connection and jumpers.

The IDE cable allowed you to connect the hard drive to the motherboard directly using its ribbon cable. We could find 34-pin and 40-pin cables, which achieved a data transfer rate of 133 Mbps or 100 Mbps maximum. The IDE port or connector on the motherboard used to be blue.

As for powering IDE hard drives, they used to be powered by a Molex cable running from the power supply to the hard drive. Currently, this power is no longer seen on hard drives, but the connection is SATA.

Finally, the famous jumpers are those who send orders to the motherboard to recognize the hard drive in question in one way or another. The jumper was a kind of "hood" that was placed between two pins of the IDE hard drive. You had to follow the manufacturer's instructions to position the jumper one way or another.

In this way, the placement of the jumper caused each hard disk to have a role (primary and secondary) that served to predetermine the boot .

• Teacher. It is the main hard disk where the operating system is installed and it is the one that the system chooses to start. Slave. It is the secondary hard disk and serves to accompany the main one as a backup HDD to store data. Cable selection. If we place the jumper in this way, the system will be the one that will decide the master and the slave. However, this configuration can cause conflicts.

If we only had an IDE hard drive, it had to be configured as a master; if we had two, one as a master and the other as a slave. Each IDE channel supported two hard drives.

We recommend reading our guide on the best motherboards on the market

This technology became obsolete when they introduced SATA, the new interface. Anyway, there are adapters that we can buy to connect our IDE disks to our SATA motherboards to take advantage of old information or old memories. Did you have an IDE hard drive? Do you keep them? Do you have good memories?