HDD pin outs

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Rickles

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#154532 30-Oct-2014 22:45

A friend has brought me their laptop/2.5 inch IDE hard drive, having broken a couple of pins ... not quite sure what they were doing with it, but that's another story

The missing pins are numbers 43 and 44, cited in diagrams as GRD and TYPE.

I placed the drive into an external cradle, and it appears to be working fine, so what do pins 43 & 44 do?

Ground I can understand, but 44 is designated "TYPE (0 = ATA), which I assumed the drive was anyway.

R.

MadEngineer

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#1165388 30-Oct-2014 23:09

0 = ata
1 = atapi

http://wiki.osdev.org/PCI_IDE_Controller

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Rickles

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#1165474 31-Oct-2014 08:43

I had seen that, but because those pins cannot be jumpered I assume they are only 'activated' once the device is detected, viz. either a hard drive or an optical/DVD drive?

Because this device is an ATA hard drive, the broken pins will not hinder its operation?

R.

MadEngineer

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#1165871 31-Oct-2014 13:30

So long as it treats disconnected as a zero it should be fine. A floating level could go either way however and I have no idea what would happen when it goes high. I imagine the worst that could happen is the toggling of packet mode (see above link) and it switches over to PIO mode.

You're not on Atlantis anymore, Duncan Idaho.