A customer of ours makes industrial robots that run on very old, but stable, hardware and software. The only bottleneck has always been the hard drive in these moving machines. Due to constant movement (shocks etc.) HDDs normally don't survive beyond six months.
So now we're trying to connect an SSD. The motherboard doesn't have a SATA connection (no surprise there) so we're using a SATA-to-IDE converter to connect it to the IDE port on the motherboard. This works and the BIOS recognizes the drive.
Only problem is that it won't boot. It freezes on POST. In the BIOS (from the 1990s), we need to specify some values, called 'HEADS', 'SYL', 'CLUSTER', and 'LANDZ'. Unlike traditional HDDs, this drive obviously has no platters. Is there a way the drive mimics these things on IDE and can we somehow find out what these values should be for our specific drive? We have changed the values at random and sometimes it passes POST, sometimes it doesn't. If it does, however, it still doesn't boot and just says there's no drive connected.
In short, does anyone have any experience connecting a SATA SSD to an old IDE motherboard and what can we do to make this work (if anything)?
Best Answer
I would use an industrial IDE SSD...(another option). It doesn't sound like you need much space, and there are SSDs made specifically for this purpose. I would NOT bother with IDE adapters and consumer-level SSDs for this application. If you do go for compact flash, again, try something that's purpose-built for the application.