Can you use a 40 pin PATA cable on the RPi pins?

mishmosh21 · November 24, 2016

Can you use it? if so, what for?

Thanks!

Technous285 · November 24, 2016

Those pins are GPIO - General Purpose Input/Output. they're NOT for plugging a drive straight onto, but are for things like sending control signals to a motor (eg: 3D printer kit) or for inputting commands from a gamepad (eg: most portable Pi-based gaming systems).

mariushm · November 24, 2016

There's nothing stopping your from using an IDE cable on the RPI pins, except the fact that the cable is often keyed (one hole is filled)

You can't connect a hard drive at the other end though... it wouldn't work. RPI 3 has only about 25 general purpose IO pins, the rest are 3.3v , 5v and ground pins.

The 40 pin ata connector on hard drive has 6 ground wires, so you'd only need one ground pin on the rpi3 to connect those, which leaves you with 35 pins that need to be connected to 25 general purpose pins on RPI. Maybe a few of them can be hardcoded to some default value so they wouldn't have to be connected to the rpi connector, but it's still a stretch.

And even if you actually manage to make some adapter board to convert the ATA connector on hard drives to a rpi 3 compatible connector, you'd still have to write the software to send commands to the hard drive, receive bytes, write bytes, which would be quite complex and depending on how fast those general purpose pins are, maybe impossible.