IDE to USB

[Tydog]

Alright so i"ve been thinking alot about this lately.
How exactly a IDE to USB cable work?
Does it just essentially connect all 40 pins from the IDE
cable to the 4 pins of the USB cable??

If this is true than I should be able to construct my own.
Unfortunately I have been unable to find ANY type of
tutorial what so ever for this using google. All I can
find is pinouts of the IDE interface and that of the USB
interface. This doesn't really help because I have no
clue which pins on the IDE interface go to those of the
USB interface.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

 

[Othersider]

It's not a cable. It's a controller. IDE 40 pin is a parallel interface: multiple pairs of wires carry signals back and forth at the same time. USB is (see that letter in the middle) a serial interface. There is only 1 signal pair that carries information by pulsing on and off. There's a lot more going on than just soldering in converting between them.

 

[jpmkm]

There are active electronics inside a usb -> ide converter. In other words, there is a chip that takes the parallel data from an ide drive and converts it to usb signals, and vice versa. It is not simply a matter of connecting lines to lines. You can buy a usb<->ide chip if you really want and then just use the datasheet to tell you how to hook everything up. That would involve quite a bit of surface mount soldering, though.