A compact automobile that runs on a coal boiler. A mobile phone that solely lets you textual content through Morse code. And a contemporary, multi-terabyte 2.5-inch SSD that connects to a motherboard with an IDE interface. What do all this stuff have in widespread? They’re completely believable know-how mixtures that you just’d should be a little bit loopy to truly construct. But the final one is now a actuality, a minimum of a theoretical one.

For these of our readers who won’t be capable of purchase their very own alcohol but: IDE stands for Integrated Drive Electronics. Also referred to as Parallel-ATA, it’s a 40-pin connector we used to attach exhausting drives and disc drives to motherboards earlier than SATA (Serial-ATA) got here alongside. If you had been constructing or upgrading PCs from round 1990 to 2005, you understand the broad, floppy ribbon of an IDE cable nicely: it made desktop case cable routing a headache.

Github consumer “DosDude1” (noticed by Tom’s Hardware) remembers IDE fondly. Or maybe they don’t, and so they’ve designed an IDE interface for a contemporary storage controller out of pure necessity. Either method, when you have a Silicon Motion SM2236 controller, a bunch of NAND flash storage modules, and a little bit of soldering and programming ability, you’ll be able to create your individual 2.5-inch SSD that connects with an IDE-equipped motherboard.

The velocity of your flash storage (as much as 2 TB of it, when you max out the 4 512GB connections) will vastly bottleneck the IDE connection, which tops out at 133 megabits per second. That’s about one-fifth the velocity of a contemporary SATA III connection, which can also be about the identical distinction between SATA III and a speedy NVMe M.2 drive (3.5 Gbps). But hey, when you completely have to run Red Alert II on period-accurate {hardware}, apart from insanely quick storage, right here’s your likelihood.