By and large, the Raspberry Pi is a computer that eschews legacy interfaces. Primarily relying on SD cards for storage and USB ports for further expansion, magnetic hard drives are a rare sight. However, [Manawyrm] decided that some 40-pin goodness was in order, and set to making a PATA IDE adapter for the platform.
To achieve the task of interfacing now-vintage IDE devices with the Raspberry Pi, [Manawyrm] elected to use the single board computer’s GPIO pins to get the job done. 23 pins are required, with 16 used for the data bus, with the rest dedicated to address lines, strobes, and other features.
The adapter is no speed demon, netting 800 kbit/s on reads and 500 kbit/s on writes with a Raspberry Pi 4. The main bottleneck comes from relying on libgpiod, which [Manawyrm] readily admits is designed for general IO tasks, not data transfers. Despite this, it’s still fast enough to play an audio CD from an IDE CD-ROM drive without skipping. A kernel build is required, however, as Raspberry Pis are unsurprisingly not configured to use ATA disks by default.
Obviously, more serious applications would substitute a dedicated USB hard disk adapter or give the Raspberry Pi a PCI-express (PCIe) card for sata drives instead, but that doesn’t discount the fun inherent in the build. While it may be slow, it shows that talking to PATA hard disks is actually quite straightforward when you understand the basics. Of course, if you want to do the opposite, and have your Raspberry Pi emulate a PATA disk, that’s possible too. Video after the break.
