Classic computing fanatic Collin “dosdude1” Mistr hereafter “Collin,” has put collectively a board design that fills within the gap left by the departure of the 1.8″ Zero Insertion Drive (ZIF) IDE exhausting drive format — providing an open supply solid-state pin-compatible various.
“[This is] a ZIF IDE SSD I designed myself,” Mistr explains, “meant to be used in any machine that makes use of a 40-pin 1.8″ ZIF IDE exhausting disk […] such because the 2008 MacBook Air, Sony Vaio UX UMPCs, or what have you ever. It is a customized [board] that I designed myself, and the rationale I’ve designed this myself is as a result of the one various to one thing like it is a CompactFlash Card — that are ridiculous costly, for some motive — or a type of actually sketchy Chinese language ZIF IDE exhausting drives.”
The 1.8″ exhausting drive type issue was initially developed by Built-in Peripherals and launched in 1993, as an alternative choice to 2.5″ drives for moveable PCs aiming to shrink their dimensions or cram in different parts. Whereas not as small as IBM’s Microdrive, which used a one-inch disk to place a spinning platter into CompactFlash-compatible housing, it shrunk the storage footprint sufficient to see comparatively broad adoption — proper till it was deserted in favor of two.5″ and M.2 SSDs, or for some producers the even-more-space-saving various of soldering flash chips on to the motherboard.
These making an attempt to get well a classic machine t depends on a 1.8″ drive, unique fashions of that are failing as they attain the tip of their pure lives, are caught, then — which is the place Mistr’s design comes into play. Constructed across the Silicon Movement SM2236 flash controller, the board mimics the unique ZIF IDE normal completely — however replaces a spinning platter with as much as 4 64GB NAND flash chips for a complete capability of 256GB.
The board accepts as much as 4 NAND flash chips, offering they’re appropriate with the controller. (📷: dosdude1)
There’s just one actual catch to the mission, apart from having to decide on your NAND flash rigorously for compatibility with the controller: “The Silicon Movement SM2236 controller pinout and implementation have been reverse-engineered from open paperwork and salvaged PCBs,” Mistr warns, “all of which have been legally obtained. Don’t anticipate this to be appropriate, examine for your self.”
These excited about constructing their very own, and keen to examine the pinout, can discover the PCB design information on Mistr’s GitHub repository beneath the reciprocal GNU Normal Public License 3.
