IDEFat Library for IDE Hard Drive and Mega

I have posted the first version of the IDEFat library at Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting. This libary joins a version of the SDFat FAT32 file system code with low-level IDE hard drive access. A total of 24 digital pins are required, requiring a Mega.

Or something '1284 based ...

A schematic for how that hard-drive is connected would be a lot more useful than that picture of spaghetti that you posted.

A pin-out chart is provided in the README.txt file in the zip. The photo was just to show the direct connection between the arduino and the ide cable discussed in the aforementioned README.txt. Since no additional components are required (unless you want to add the led for drive activity) a schematic seemed unnecessary.

A pin-out chart is provided in the README.txt file in the zip.

OK. I'm going to check this out then.

You must understand the HDD IDE protocol, and how HDDs work. What would be the most simple way to actively communicate with a HDD PCB, so that the spindle spins indefinitely? I don't need to access stored data, and it will be physically impossible (I removed the reading head).

This is awesome, I was trying to find a way to connect a mini IDE ATA hard drive up to an ATmega but wasn't sure how the buffer address is incremented inside the hard drive. Most tutorials just show reading or writing X amount of bytes for sector read/write.

Why? PATA is a little out of date.

You can easily connect a small USB hard drive like a 1-2 TB 2.5" drive. Here is a library.

You can plug the drive into an Mega ADK with no extra hardware. You can use this host shield for other Arduino boards.

Sure bUt it's turning into fun doing it at the binary machine language level.
I'm testing it out, but only able to read the first byte of the sector or device id of the hard drive.

Any ideas on whether the drives have a set baud rate we have to read data to and from, or do we toggle the read.write pin on the hard drive with the chip select held low?

It is confusing, but being able to read the first entry of a sector and device id is pretty exciting when handling everything in binary.

I was wanting to see if I could do it the old fashioned way. It seems to working some, but not reading or writing data properly yet, though it's handing the first entry. It would be awesome to get it working with binary commands to write raw data to sectors.

Thanks

fat16lib:
Why? PATA is a little out of date.

You can easily connect a small USB hard drive like a 1-2 TB 2.5" drive. Here is a library.

You can plug the drive into an Mega ADK with no extra hardware. You can use this host shield for other Arduino boards.

But there are plenty of reclaimed 1.5" 20GB - 40GB hard drives out there - that are eminently suitable for tiny, battery-powered datacapture projects (which is what I am interested in) - and at virtually no cost. Those USB external drives can be a bit power-hungry, after all.

I might consider using a portable USB HDD at some point, but really, where's the fun?

32 GB SD cards are less thn $10. 40 GB is too small to bother with for a hard drive.

Still little fun pluging a 1TB USB drive in.