IMATION SUPERDISK ADAPTER PC SERIAL

Aside from that, there are a number of resistors, capacitors, LEDs, a voltage regulator, an unmarked microcontroller (?) and the flash memory containing the firmware. Conveniently, the QC Passed label is applied over the converter IC to “hide” the markings from view. All components are mounted to the top, with only the connectors being through-hole mounted. The unit itself is built on a black PCB with yellow silkscreen. Both come packaged in a sealed anti-static shielding bag with no other accessories or instructions. The left-hand side one is intended for use with regular PCs, sporting regular Molex power connectors, whereas the unit on the right is intended for use as a substitute for 44-pin IDE hard drives in laptops. The AdaptersĪs there were two types of adapters for around the same price, I decided to buy one of each. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could use some commodity low-cost flash memory to replace IDE drives? After all, performance of microSD cards have skyrocketed to levels which could easily best many IDE drives (whose interface often topped out at 100MB/s for reliability reasons, depending on the controller and the drive, with very few to no mechanical drives saturating the interface).Īfter a little searching on eBay, I found some generic SD to IDE adapters for around AU$11 a piece and I thought I’d give them a try. While some are now on SATA, we’ve started a migration away from spinning drives to solid state and from SATA to NVMe/PCIe based interfaces. As no new IDE hard drives are made, any drive available is (by necessity) old stock or second hand.

IMATION SUPERDISK ADAPTER PC SERIAL

For floppy drives, there are USB-floppy emulators, for PCI you can potentially fit a USB 2.0 card and a Gigabit Ethernet card to get some modern interfaces on board, for serial ports you could use a null-modem cable and a USB-to-serial adapter on a modern computer, for the AT-supply and AT DIN keyboard plug there are ATX/PS2 adapters, for VGA you could use an HDMI converter and if you have floppy disks/CD-ROMs you can also use USB floppy/optical drives.īut what about hard drives? Being the mechanical beasts that they are, they’re now starting to succumb to age and have various subtle capacity barriers along the way which can impact on the compatibility of replacements (528MB, 2.1GB, 4.2GB, 8.4GB, 32GB, 128GB to name a few). If you’re the type to have a few older “semi-retro” computers lying about, you’ve probably got a few old interfaces that are becoming difficult to use.

Imation superdisk adapter pc