The Raspberry Pi Pico is good for a lot of things; this is not one of them (due to the lack of at least USB 2.0 High Speed). An LPC18xx, LPC43xx or even IMXRT106x would've been a much better choice.
USB 1.1 Full Speed is 12 Mbit, i.e. 1.5 MB/s theoretical, zero overhead accounted for. That's an order of magnitude you're missing there. Whether it matters depends on how large the drive is, I guess.
It also bears pointing out these microcontrollers have built-in parallel memory interface buses, which are likely compatible with IDE (which is just ISA == the 8088/8086 parallel bus on a cable.) With DMA, ketchup and fries…
"While cheap, modern adapters usually only work with newer "LBA" type drives, ATAboy works all the way back to the earliest CHS only, PIO Mode 0, ATA disks."
So I guess this would work on some particularly ancient drives that a USB adapter wouldn't work with - not that I've ever encountered one. It is vibecoded, but sounds like it would work fine to get an image off of the drive, which won't be very large compared to even modest contemporary storage capacities.
I don’t know, I have a cheap Chinese USB adapter and it read a 40 Mb hard drive from a 286 laptop just fine, so… plus larger (hundreds of MBs) disks too.
I've got an adapter that only goes up to 40GB because it's 20 yrs old.
ATA (aka IDE or EIDE) was all they had before SATA so these adapters were all over the place.
WTF is a Pi for?
There's small little chips that do exactly this interface, still probably plenty available surplus for cheap since ATA is not popular any more.
Any ATA HDD that works on a mainstream USB adapter will handle CHS for DOS usage just fine, or LBA. Pretty much automatically. This was already smoothed out before about 1994 or so.
DOS of the '90's could handle LBA anyway, I like the MS-DOS from Win98SE which was not available separately by then but after W98 is installed to a FAT32 partition, the key DOS OS files in W98 will be available to copy to a fresh fat32 volume. You pretty much copy the same (newer) DOS files from W98 to your DOS root that it would have after installing DOS 6.22
Not only that but Windows 10 will still install and run on drives with these old connectors just fine in BIOS mode as expected but also partitioned & formatted with the latest GPT HDD layout, GPT would boot with UEFI rather than BIOS for most mainstream configurations.
But also if you do it right, GPT will boot a plain MBR HDD if the UEFI can find a suitable FAT32 BOOT folder.
UEFI + GPT alone is just too lame to run DOS on bare metal any more. Not without BIOS mode or CSM enabled. GPT is still a show-stopper though, DOS needs MBR drive layout :(
OTOH MS-DOS will still install & run on any PC or drive, even NVMe, as long as there is a CSM or legacy BIOS mode and you are not stuck with a crippled mother board having only UEFI. GPT-only means no DOS for you. Not without some kludge like a virtual machine.
The purpose of UEFI + GPT was to make it so you couldn't run DOS, Win3.x, W9x, Wxp, Vista, W7, and Linux ever again on bare metal.
The Raspberry Pi Pico is good for a lot of things; this is not one of them (due to the lack of at least USB 2.0 High Speed). An LPC18xx, LPC43xx or even IMXRT106x would've been a much better choice.
You might only be able to get 8-16MB/s max out of some of those old drives (especially pre-1994), so you probably aren't missing much.
edit: whoops, that's bytes not bits per second
USB 1.1 Full Speed is 12 Mbit, i.e. 1.5 MB/s theoretical, zero overhead accounted for. That's an order of magnitude you're missing there. Whether it matters depends on how large the drive is, I guess.
It also bears pointing out these microcontrollers have built-in parallel memory interface buses, which are likely compatible with IDE (which is just ISA == the 8088/8086 parallel bus on a cable.) With DMA, ketchup and fries…
Aand it's vibe-coded. Nope. There are zillions of PATA USB adapters available on secondary markets that work.
From article:
"While cheap, modern adapters usually only work with newer "LBA" type drives, ATAboy works all the way back to the earliest CHS only, PIO Mode 0, ATA disks."
So I guess this would work on some particularly ancient drives that a USB adapter wouldn't work with - not that I've ever encountered one. It is vibecoded, but sounds like it would work fine to get an image off of the drive, which won't be very large compared to even modest contemporary storage capacities.
I don’t know, I have a cheap Chinese USB adapter and it read a 40 Mb hard drive from a 286 laptop just fine, so… plus larger (hundreds of MBs) disks too.
I've got an adapter that only goes up to 40GB because it's 20 yrs old.
ATA (aka IDE or EIDE) was all they had before SATA so these adapters were all over the place.
WTF is a Pi for?
There's small little chips that do exactly this interface, still probably plenty available surplus for cheap since ATA is not popular any more.
Any ATA HDD that works on a mainstream USB adapter will handle CHS for DOS usage just fine, or LBA. Pretty much automatically. This was already smoothed out before about 1994 or so.
DOS of the '90's could handle LBA anyway, I like the MS-DOS from Win98SE which was not available separately by then but after W98 is installed to a FAT32 partition, the key DOS OS files in W98 will be available to copy to a fresh fat32 volume. You pretty much copy the same (newer) DOS files from W98 to your DOS root that it would have after installing DOS 6.22
Here's a USB adapter now:
https://www.amazon.com/SATA-Adapter-Converter-Cable-Drive/dp...
Not only that but Windows 10 will still install and run on drives with these old connectors just fine in BIOS mode as expected but also partitioned & formatted with the latest GPT HDD layout, GPT would boot with UEFI rather than BIOS for most mainstream configurations.
But also if you do it right, GPT will boot a plain MBR HDD if the UEFI can find a suitable FAT32 BOOT folder.
UEFI + GPT alone is just too lame to run DOS on bare metal any more. Not without BIOS mode or CSM enabled. GPT is still a show-stopper though, DOS needs MBR drive layout :(
OTOH MS-DOS will still install & run on any PC or drive, even NVMe, as long as there is a CSM or legacy BIOS mode and you are not stuck with a crippled mother board having only UEFI. GPT-only means no DOS for you. Not without some kludge like a virtual machine.
The purpose of UEFI + GPT was to make it so you couldn't run DOS, Win3.x, W9x, Wxp, Vista, W7, and Linux ever again on bare metal.
Not without CSM. The key UEFI module.